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Comment by bugmen0t | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised that none of the business who are in direct competition with Google (or in fear thereof) start to contribute & make use of Gecko. It's really mind-boggling how many companies and how much money depends on the implementation of the web platform. Why would you use the one that is always acting in Google's interest? For mobile apps, GeckoView should be an interesting replacement of other webviews.

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I have long wondered why Mozilla hasn't worked on a embeddable Gecko engine as an alternative to Electron.

A long time ago, Mozilla did have the option to embed Gecko into apps. It was badly-documented and difficult to use.

A modern embeddable Gecko engine could be promoted as a modular, cross-platform alternative to Electron. The Gecko advantages: stripped-down, faster and less memory hungry than Electron (assuming these features can be achieved).

The traction that Electron has gained as a cross-platform option for building apps is huge and is only set to get bigger (whether for better or worse). And yet, Mozilla is completely absent from this space dominated by Chromium/Electron.

Imagine if thousands of developers place their trust in Mozilla because they have built their cross-platform apps using Gecko. They want to see Mozilla grow and succeed because they have a stake in seeing Gecko development succeed too. (And that could include large corporates sponsoring Mozilla to sustain development of Gecko.) Unfortunately, it is probably too late (or too unrealistic) for this to happen.

Would any of the above revive Firefox? Possibly not. However, an embeddable Gecko engine may give Mozilla new opportunities.

Unfortunately Mozilla seems having problems with managing larger products or changes. I was following recent (last year iirc) transition of Thunderbird from xul based extensions to webextensions - no updated roadmap, the new extension model was pushed to production while being only part ready. Examples provided by Mozilla team were outdated and some used features that were no longer available. Other features were not implemented, some worked for pop3 and not for imap accounts. This thing was and probably still is a mess. So while the product you described seems to have some potential, i can't imagine it being run by Mozilla and attracting developers.

There was a project to do this, Positron.

https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/

Revolving door management that has no clue what initiatives the previous management started and wants to start all their own initiatives really hurt Mozilla in the last 5 years.

This existed for a long time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XUL https://www-archive.mozilla.org/why/framework.html https://www-archive.mozilla.org/projects/xul/joy-of-xul

I second this observation. Last month I was looking for "webview" alternatives on Linux (with bindings in Rust, Go or Python); I wanted to create a simple chrome-less browser that allows me to override / takeover HTTP requests.

However to my astonishment, these isn't even one Gecko-based alternative. I've found a few based on WebKit (I've ended up using Qt5 in Python), a few based on Chromium (including Electron / nwjs), but zero for Gecko...

If perhaps Gecko would be easily embedable (and perhaps used less resources than Chromium), it could start appearing in other applications, and thus at least get some market-share in that segment.

Or perhaps if Servo is. It's the newer upgraded replacement to Gecko.

Servo is not at a level that it can compete with Gecko. It may work for many use cases, but it's not an 'upgrade' or 'replacement' for Gecko.

Gecko is riddled with technical debt. People may have an emotional attachment to it, but technically it's a dead end. Sorry but that is the truth.

Engineers are actively rewriting the debts and throwing the old stuff away. The old graphics layering system was just removed upon completely moving to WebRender, for example.

Forget commercial, even just looking at FOSS projects, are there any cross platform browsers based on Gecko other than Firefox?

Not directly, but there are a few notable forks:

* Palemoon * Waterfox

Both of those are Gecko based, not Webkit based.

> none of the business who are in direct competition with Google

You mean Facebook? No thanx.

I don't think there's all that much that Google can force on Webkit or Chromium that benefits them. What are some examples you can think of?

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