Firefox's addons also only work with Firefox. Thunderbird and Komodo also only work on top of the Mozilla platform. Eclipse and Netbeans needs Java. A bunch of

Firefox's addons also only work with Firefox. Thunderbird and Komodo also only work on top of the Mozilla platform. Eclipse and Netbeans needs Java. A bunch of apps need Air. You can make this work inside XULRunner if you want. You only have to write some library which provides the same API as the chrome_gen package (reading/writing files etc) and then import it instead of chrome_gen or just overwrite the package. Everything else is regular web stuff. Anyhow, using some apps which use Chrome as runtime doesn't meant that you have to use Chrome as default browser. You only need to have it installed. Just like any other runtime you're using.