Dang, that sucks. I noticed that he says "its principal feature was that it was Electron-compatible" about Positron.

That's a lofty, and frankly, unnecessary goal.

Maybe Positron could/should be revived, as a thing of its own, an independent Gecko-based app host, with its own API, distinct and separate from Electron.

(I'm guessing the author of Positron was hoping to attract current Electron users by aiming to make a switch as easy and seamless as possible with a compatible API, and while that's valuable, it would be good to just have an incompatible Electron competitor to begin with.)

I get that it's nice to know exactly which version something is running on, but something i have found myself wanting when writing a small cli-script for downloading youtube videos, is something like Deno allowing me to run somebody's script, or somebody else to run mine, without fear of it damaging my system. But then also with the rendering engine so it could be just "deno run http://host/myscript.ts --allow-net=googlevideo.net,youtube.com --allow-write=." but it allows me to render a more friendly UI. I wish somebody a lot more competent than me would make such a tool from gecko

Feature set is obviously very different.

Gecko is a different rendering engine.

Well, "from Mozilla" is a subset of the larger and more valuable "not Blink"/"not from Google", which is handy if you're worried about an adtech company owning the entire web ecosystem.