4 ms·

> Firefox uses Gecko as its browser engine. The worthwhile parts of Servo are already in Firefox by way of Gecko. And Gecko has been notoriously unembeddable.

by Ygg2 3y ago

> Firefox uses Gecko as its browser engine. The worthwhile parts of Servo are already in Firefox by way of Gecko. And Gecko has been notoriously unembeddable. Which kinda helped the whole CEF spread. Not to mention Mozilla basically kneecapped Servo and Firefox by firing most of its devs in a purge.

crotchfire 3y ago
Mozilla needs to hear this more often. There is only one browser, because browsers need to be embeddable, and Firefox isn't.
- lmeyerov 3y ago
  Interesting to work through that On its face, it's a tough sustainability position for an org of Mozilla's size b/c browser revenue - today - is from controlling the search bar (and maybe now payments APIs?). By making Firefox embeddable, Mozilla gives that revenue to whoever is doing the embedding. Ex: Brave <> Chrome engine. Building for embedding developers can be super distracting if no sustainability, which isn't a problem for Google: They still make money from embedding by owning the embedding environments like Android. AFAICT, Mozilla failed to land in sizeable markets there. They tried to own & partner in the embedding envs -- e.g., FirefoxOS -- so maybe the trick is to get a more generous rev share for phone vendors wanting to break free of Google? Historically didn't seem to really work out, but maybe genAI w/ consumer/prosumer-grade UIs is reopening that door. Evolutions like that in turn may take quite an engineering & culture rethink as well, not easy to turn such a big & decentralized ship. I'll keep rooting for them!
  - jwells89 3y ago
    I’m not well-versed on the internals of FirefoxOS, but I’m not sure it really counts as embedding because to my understanding, the entirety of the user-facing UI was built with Gecko. Embedding entails usage of the engine with unrelated toolkits, e.g. AppKit/UIKit or GTK. If that’s true, then Mozilla wouldn’t have been making money from Gecko’s ability to embed with FirefoxOS unless the project took a sharp corner and changed UI toolkits.
    - lmeyerov 3y ago
      The FirefoxOS scenario would be Gecko embedding in FirefoxOS, so Mozilla is their own customer, and makes $ by being the controller of FirefoxOS - OS search, and configuration of browser search It's less likely the handset manufacturer would be able to change search bar defaults in those scenarios, at least without a stronger profit sharing negotiation, as they'd probably be already negotiating a more careful licensing & teaming agreement
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- paulrouget 3y ago
  I was part of Mozilla back then. I think we were already talking about making Gecko embeddable in __2003__. But then… looot of things happened, other priorities, competition, bad decisions, etc etc.
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  Arguably neither is Chrome. Electron, CEF and WebView2 are all forks of it. Google has no interest in a supported official embedding API.
cxr 3y ago
I'm struggling to see the logical throughline that connects your comment to mine, or even how it relates to itself. Gecko was originally conceived to be embeddable by design. TPTB decided this was a handicap. It's not an accident that it's hard to work with outside the context that is its modern raison d'être; it is now unembeddable, if not "by design" then certainly by choice. Servo is not a product, and there is no product for which Servo is an integral component. Servo was an R&D project. It succeeded. Mozilla laid off a bunch of Servo developers, partly because of COVID, and partly because it was (past) done; it doesn't make sense to keep paying for R&D at Servo's stage. It's debatable whether it's even R&D at that point—more like wankery/noodling (i.e. what most programmers want to do, but that the world already has enough of).
- paulrouget 3y ago
  > Gecko was originally conceived to be embeddable by design Which part? And… what do you mean by embeddable in that context?
  - zokier 3y ago
    XULRunner?
    - paulrouget 3y ago
      XULRunner was not Gecko embed. It was Gecko embedding stuff. There was never a proper embeddable gecko. There has been an attempt for a gtk widget, but it never matured.
      - cxr 3y ago
        "There was never a proper embeddable gecko" is both (a) a strong claim which with some difficulty we might be able adjudicate, but not especially important whether we do or not because, crucially, it is (b) not the same thing as saying/proving that "Gecko was not originally conceived to be embeddable" (or proving that its negation is untrue). Gecko was not, at the time that Servo was conceived, supposed to be easy to embed. Gecko had, by the time that Servo was conceived, undergone refactoring that knowingly made it more difficult to embed. It would be accurate to say that, at the time that Servo was conceived, embeddability of Gecko was an explicit non-goal. This is exactly why I raised the issue of the logical throughline of the other comment—what is the point of mentioning Gecko's embeddability in this discussion? All right, Gecko is "notoriously unembeddable". So what? It's a complete nonsequitur, and it risks catching anyone off guard if they're not playing close enough attention and they mistake it for a salient retort of... something not actually stated or argued here
KyleSanderson 3y ago
If only one could Boot2Gecko

by Ygg2 3y ago

crotchfire 3y ago

Mozilla needs to hear this more often. There is only one browser, because browsers need to be embeddable, and Firefox isn't.

lmeyerov 3y ago
Interesting to work through that On its face, it's a tough sustainability position for an org of Mozilla's size b/c browser revenue - today - is from controlling the search bar (and maybe now payments APIs?). By making Firefox embeddable, Mozilla gives that revenue to whoever is doing the embedding. Ex: Brave <> Chrome engine. Building for embedding developers can be super distracting if no sustainability, which isn't a problem for Google: They still make money from embedding by owning the embedding environments like Android. AFAICT, Mozilla failed to land in sizeable markets there. They tried to own & partner in the embedding envs -- e.g., FirefoxOS -- so maybe the trick is to get a more generous rev share for phone vendors wanting to break free of Google? Historically didn't seem to really work out, but maybe genAI w/ consumer/prosumer-grade UIs is reopening that door. Evolutions like that in turn may take quite an engineering & culture rethink as well, not easy to turn such a big & decentralized ship. I'll keep rooting for them!
- jwells89 3y ago
  I’m not well-versed on the internals of FirefoxOS, but I’m not sure it really counts as embedding because to my understanding, the entirety of the user-facing UI was built with Gecko. Embedding entails usage of the engine with unrelated toolkits, e.g. AppKit/UIKit or GTK. If that’s true, then Mozilla wouldn’t have been making money from Gecko’s ability to embed with FirefoxOS unless the project took a sharp corner and changed UI toolkits.
  - lmeyerov 3y ago
    The FirefoxOS scenario would be Gecko embedding in FirefoxOS, so Mozilla is their own customer, and makes $ by being the controller of FirefoxOS - OS search, and configuration of browser search It's less likely the handset manufacturer would be able to change search bar defaults in those scenarios, at least without a stronger profit sharing negotiation, as they'd probably be already negotiating a more careful licensing & teaming agreement
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
paulrouget 3y ago
I was part of Mozilla back then. I think we were already talking about making Gecko embeddable in __2003__. But then… looot of things happened, other priorities, competition, bad decisions, etc etc.
mike_hearn 3y ago
Arguably neither is Chrome. Electron, CEF and WebView2 are all forks of it. Google has no interest in a supported official embedding API.

cxr 3y ago

I'm struggling to see the logical throughline that connects your comment to mine, or even how it relates to itself. Gecko was originally conceived to be embeddable by design. TPTB decided this was a handicap. It's not an accident that it's hard to work with outside the context that is its modern raison d'être; it is now unembeddable, if not "by design" then certainly by choice. Servo is not a product, and there is no product for which Servo is an integral component. Servo was an R&D project. It succeeded. Mozilla laid off a bunch of Servo developers, partly because of COVID, and partly because it was (past) done; it doesn't make sense to keep paying for R&D at Servo's stage. It's debatable whether it's even R&D at that point—more like wankery/noodling (i.e. what most programmers want to do, but that the world already has enough of).

paulrouget 3y ago
> Gecko was originally conceived to be embeddable by design Which part? And… what do you mean by embeddable in that context?
- zokier 3y ago
  XULRunner?
  - paulrouget 3y ago
    XULRunner was not Gecko embed. It was Gecko embedding stuff. There was never a proper embeddable gecko. There has been an attempt for a gtk widget, but it never matured.
    - cxr 3y ago
      "There was never a proper embeddable gecko" is both (a) a strong claim which with some difficulty we might be able adjudicate, but not especially important whether we do or not because, crucially, it is (b) not the same thing as saying/proving that "Gecko was not originally conceived to be embeddable" (or proving that its negation is untrue). Gecko was not, at the time that Servo was conceived, supposed to be easy to embed. Gecko had, by the time that Servo was conceived, undergone refactoring that knowingly made it more difficult to embed. It would be accurate to say that, at the time that Servo was conceived, embeddability of Gecko was an explicit non-goal. This is exactly why I raised the issue of the logical throughline of the other comment—what is the point of mentioning Gecko's embeddability in this discussion? All right, Gecko is "notoriously unembeddable". So what? It's a complete nonsequitur, and it risks catching anyone off guard if they're not playing close enough attention and they mistake it for a salient retort of... something not actually stated or argued here

KyleSanderson 3y ago

If only one could Boot2Gecko