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Mozilla Positron, their attempt at an Electron-compatible runtime on top of Gecko, did not pick up any traction and was cancelled.
by tomnipotent 2y ago
Mozilla Positron, their attempt at an Electron-compatible runtime on top of Gecko, did not pick up any traction and was cancelled.
- cosmic_cheese 2y agoThat was quite late in the game, though. Kind of like closing the barn doors after the horses have already bolted.
- tomnipotent 2y agoIt was released in 2016, only two years after Atom and Slack and a year after VSCode. Not sure I'd call that late.
- cosmic_cheese 2y agoBy that point Electron had gained too much momentum and public mindshare to compete with without a big marketing push and flagship project at least as significant as Atom and VSCode were. Positron never got either.
- tomnipotent 2y agoElectron apps were popular, not Electron itself. Even now there are only 4-5 dozen popular apps using it, while I probably run across that number of Qt/GTK apps a month. It's a sort of weird dichotomy it finds itself it.
- mook 2y agoMozilla XULRunner, which was the thing that happened before Electron, wasn't too bad though. It had way more traction than Positron. It died because Mozilla didn't care about it.
- brnt 2y agoWell, and XULRunner was based in XUL, something Mozilla was trying to get rid of for very good reasons.
- notpushkin 2y agoIt did work with HTML though IIRC. (Well, given Firefox UI is now mostly HTML with some XUL sprinkled on top.)