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Comment by mhd | Hacker News Reader

Ah, "native" and "firefox" really makes me miss Camino, which was a pretty great mix between OS X standard UI features and the FF rendering engine. But apparently keeping that up to speed with Firefox main releases was way too much effort (probably one of the reasons why there are plenty of webkit/chrome shells and almost no Firefox ones).

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The big reason was that Mozilla ended embedding Gecko with Firefox 4/Mozilla 2. This made it nearly impossible to run Gecko in anything but an XUL shell. I understand the reasons cited at the time, largely available resources, but it was very short-sighted and I think it hurt Gecko's mind shares in the long run.

I loved Camino as well. A truly excellent browser.

Gecko ending embedding is almost certainly a major reason why everything built with a browser engine is either a Chromium wrapper (not true embedding, but no browser chrome) and WebKit (true embedded).

It’s a real shame. Gecko is a nice engine but XUL is a much harder sell.

Servo is the theoretical successor in this regard, like so many other regards, right?

Is the goal of Servo to replace Gecko eventually? I thought it was more of a testbed for new rendering techniques.

Correct. It's not intended as a Gecko replacement, and several important components in Servo are already part of Gecko. Servo will continue to evolve and new features will originate from it, but it lacks a lot of the legacy and quirks rendering (intentionally) that would be required to make it a full-fledged engine of its own even if Mozilla wanted it to be.

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