
State of Embedding in Gecko - protomyth
http://chrislord.net/index.php/2016/03/08/state-of-embedding-in-gecko/
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chris_wot
Wow, maybe he didn't mean to do this, but this is quite an indictment against
the current Mozilla management team!

~~~
toyg
"Current"? Embedding Gecko has always been an exercise in futility, which is
why everyone and their dog adopted WebKit _with gusto_. Simply speaking,
Mozilla always expected people to build _on_ Gecko, rather than _with_ it. You
were expected to go XUL and treat Mozilla as your main runtime, developing the
whole program with JS on top of it. Embeddability was always an afterthought.
They took this approach to extreme levels with FFOS.

Khtml/Webkit used the opposite model and won big.

Funny enough though, Mozilla's insistence on JS as general-purpose was likely
a factor in the long-term survival of what was, back in the days, a wobbly and
improvised browser-only scripting language. In many ways, you could not have
had Node without the XUL years; but the JS explosion happened on Webkit
components, (fatally ?) wounding the Mozilla platform. History is funny like
that.

~~~
Cwiiis
This really isn't an accurate representation of what happened. WebKit's
success didn't happen overnight, and people weren't jumping on it from the
get-go. In fact, there was a long period of people using Gecko and engineering
their own embedding/browser solutions because it was widely, and correctly
realised that Gecko was a more mature and featureful engine. This was my job
for several years before I was employed by Mozilla (and indeed, I did do some
WebKit work at the time too - but there was far less demand for it).

It was only through a long period of neglecting these users that WebKit was
allowed to mature and become successful. There was a good reason for doing
this (see yoric's blog post, linked in my other comment above), but I think
we've past the time now where we need to reconsider this direction somewhat.

~~~
toyg
It didn't happen overnight because any embedding project takes time; but the
webkit community expanded relatively quickly as Mozilla simply did not care
about their (overall small and shrinking) own share of the market. You said it
yourself, they just did not care enough. Look at Qt, which had struggled for a
while with producing reliable Gecko bindings and then really turned a corner
with Webkit.

------
shmerl
_> That we haven’t supported this effort seems insane to me, especially as
it’s been shipping for a while as the basis for the browser in the (now
defunct?) Jolla smartphone._

Exactly. It's a shame Mozilla never accepted EmebdLite officially. What was
the problem really?

Sailfish is not defunct by the way.

 _> The quality of the work done on this seems quite high to me, after a brief
examination._

@romaxa knows what he is doing. He worked on embedding Gecko for a long time
already (including in Nokia).

