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FWIW, this is partially Mozilla's fault. About a decade ago they made the call to make it more difficult to embed Gecko outside of Firefox. Dead links abound:

FWIW, this is partially Mozilla's fault. About a decade ago they made the call to make it more difficult to embed Gecko outside of Firefox. Dead links abound: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embedding_Mozilla https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embed... Scary warnings: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embedding_Mozilla/FAQ/Embedding_Gecko https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embed... This choice (under Gary Kovacs, IIRC) has effectively made it a poor choice for _anyone_ to build on top of Mozilla's browser engine without forking the entirety of the mozilla tree. You'd need to have a very good business justification for attempting it. Since Chrome is essentially a superset of Chromium, it's been obvious how to build your own equivalent of Chrome (and first-party supported!). There is no "Firefoxium" version of Firefox, and I'd expect developers would need to go to great lengths to keep their code up-to-date on top of mozilla-central.

fabrice_d 6y ago
Building a new gecko-based browser is not the same thing as "embedding gecko", at least on desktop platforms. Creating a new gecko-based product is not very hard, even if you will hit some cases of the platform depending on firefox that you'll have to workaround or borrow. Creating a full new blink-based product is as difficult actually. Most chromium derivatives take the simpler road of forking chromium, not building a new blink-based browser (eg. Brave maintains a pile of patches). I don't understand why you would expect a "firefoxium": there is no such thing because there is no proprietary version of the open source Firefox. If you fork Firefox, you're in the same boat as people forking chromium in terms of complexity.
- t0astbread 6y ago
  What do you mean by "Creating a new gecko-based product"? I might have overlooked something but last time I checked, there was no way to use a current version of Gecko outside of Firefox, except for GeckoView on Android.
  - fabrice_d 6y ago
    Something like b2g: https://github.com/kaiostech/gecko-b2g/tree/gonk/b2g https://github.com/kaiostech/gecko-b2g/tree/gonk/b2g geckoview is also such a product, well hidden behind the android glue :)
    - t0astbread 6y ago
      I'm not sure what this is (something like FirefoxOS?) but what I meant is there's no such thing as a "Gecko WebView" (for embedding in UI frameworks) or a "Gecko Electron" that you can use without forking some huge Mozilla thing (except for GeckoView).

fabrice_d 6y ago

Building a new gecko-based browser is not the same thing as "embedding gecko", at least on desktop platforms. Creating a new gecko-based product is not very hard, even if you will hit some cases of the platform depending on firefox that you'll have to workaround or borrow. Creating a full new blink-based product is as difficult actually. Most chromium derivatives take the simpler road of forking chromium, not building a new blink-based browser (eg. Brave maintains a pile of patches). I don't understand why you would expect a "firefoxium": there is no such thing because there is no proprietary version of the open source Firefox. If you fork Firefox, you're in the same boat as people forking chromium in terms of complexity.

t0astbread 6y ago
What do you mean by "Creating a new gecko-based product"? I might have overlooked something but last time I checked, there was no way to use a current version of Gecko outside of Firefox, except for GeckoView on Android.
- fabrice_d 6y ago
  Something like b2g: https://github.com/kaiostech/gecko-b2g/tree/gonk/b2g https://github.com/kaiostech/gecko-b2g/tree/gonk/b2g geckoview is also such a product, well hidden behind the android glue :)
  - t0astbread 6y ago
    I'm not sure what this is (something like FirefoxOS?) but what I meant is there's no such thing as a "Gecko WebView" (for embedding in UI frameworks) or a "Gecko Electron" that you can use without forking some huge Mozilla thing (except for GeckoView).