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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see a version that is based on Firefox / SpiderMonkey.

It was called XUL, long before the Electron craziness.

That's an area where Mozilla could have distinguished itself by being very developer friendly. A few years ago I was looking into embedding a browser and XUL would have been a good fit but it was pretty obvious that it wasn't supported well.

Same for their Javascript engine. Node could be running on Mozilla code instead of V8 if Mozilla had been more developer friendly.

There was one started called Positron, but it was discontinued in early 2017. https://github.com/mozilla/positron

https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt is a continuation from https://github.com/mozilla/positron - last commit 6mo ago though. Probably what is needed is a killer app - VS Code, Slack, Spotify...

GeckoView is going to be the basis of new products, so I think it will have a more secure future than some past Mozilla efforts: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/GeckoView

There's more to Electron than that, but this might make it more feasible.

You'll have to wait until the Quantum/Servo project is much further along.

This was actually a thing a decade ago. But Mozilla did not keep engine and browser well enough separated, causing a lot of overhead for app developers basing their programs on the gecko engine.

Would be interesting to see another FirefoxOS attempt.

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