4 ms·

I assume they meant XULRunner[0], which was Mozilla's spiritual predecessor to Electron. Some abandoned modern alternatives included Chromeless[1], Positron[2]

by jd3 5y ago

I assume they meant XULRunner[0], which was Mozilla's spiritual predecessor to Electron. Some abandoned modern alternatives included Chromeless[1], Positron[2][3] and qbrt[4][5]. While technically possible using Firefox's XULRunner functionality (`firefox --app app.ini` — mostly undocumented, potentially unsupported in the future), as far as I can tell, Mozilla has abandoned the Electron approach for XUL/Gecko bundling, which is a shame since Firefox itself is basically just an implementation on top of the Gecko XUL runtime. > "[Firefox] is distributed as the combination of a Gecko XUL runtime — libxul, other shared libraries, and non-browser-specific resources like those in toolkit/ — plus a Firefox XUL application — mostly just the files in Contents/Resources/browser/, plus the 'firefox' stub executable that loads Gecko and points it at a XUL application" [6] On Android, there is also Geckoview[7][8] for embedding gecko. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner [1]: https://github.com/mozilla/chromeless https://github.com/mozilla/chromeless [2]: https://github.com/mozilla/positron https://github.com/mozilla/positron [3]: http://web.archive.org/web/20210227132731/https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/ http://web.archive.org/web/20210227132731/https://mykzilla.o... [4]: https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt [5]: http://web.archive.org/web/20210601133844/https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/15/introducing-qbrt/ http://web.archive.org/web/20210601133844/https://mykzilla.o... [6]: http://web.archive.org/web/20210227132731/https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/#comment-949 http://web.archive.org/web/20210227132731/https://mykzilla.o... [7]: https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview [8]: https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/ https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/

jd3 5y ago
> ...currently the only way to build something on Gecko is to build a XUL application. > You can do that in-tree by adding a XUL app to a fork of mozilla-central, like Positron does; you can do it out-of-tree in a distinct repo that uses a copy of Firefox and its –app flag to run the app, which I suspect is what mkaply is doing; or you can take a hybrid approach like Thunderbird (although this is deprecated and only supported for that app). > In all cases, however, you’re building a XUL app, and a XUL app running on Firefox via –app is almost as capable and flexible as one built in-tree (except that you can’t make changes to Gecko itself). > So it isn’t clear to me why developers wouldn’t build serious applications with that approach. Firefox itself is a serious application that uses that approach. http://web.archive.org/web/20210227132731/https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/#comment-949 http://web.archive.org/web/20210227132731/https://mykzilla.o...

by jd3 5y ago

jd3 5y ago

> ...currently the only way to build something on Gecko is to build a XUL application. > You can do that in-tree by adding a XUL app to a fork of mozilla-central, like Positron does; you can do it out-of-tree in a distinct repo that uses a copy of Firefox and its –app flag to run the app, which I suspect is what mkaply is doing; or you can take a hybrid approach like Thunderbird (although this is deprecated and only supported for that app). > In all cases, however, you’re building a XUL app, and a XUL app running on Firefox via –app is almost as capable and flexible as one built in-tree (except that you can’t make changes to Gecko itself). > So it isn’t clear to me why developers wouldn’t build serious applications with that approach. Firefox itself is a serious application that uses that approach. http://web.archive.org/web/20210227132731/https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/#comment-949 http://web.archive.org/web/20210227132731/https://mykzilla.o...