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I feel like things would be easier if Firefox could be embeded in another browser just like chromium can.

Let Google cripple their browser for themselves, and Mozilla provide the good and strong de facto browser engine.



They're at least working on making that as easy as possible on Android: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/android-components/

As I understand it, that should also make it relatively straightforward to switch between Servo and Gecko, as a developer. But I'm not an Android dev, so take that with a grain of salt.


What is currently stopping its adoption? Iirc there were several browsers based on Gecko engine. Is it drm?


Unfortunately, Embedded Gecko is not supported anymore... https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embed...

However, the new Servo engine will be embeddable.


Firefox is probably still a legacy mix of XUL, cpp and migrating to rust. I'm pretty sure chrome is easier to adapt.


XUL was replaced quite some time ago.


>XBL stats update :

>* 28 bindings (9.33% of original bindings)

>* 10517 lines of code (21.02% of original LOCs)

https://twitter.com/mozxbl


Yes, apparently I was wrong. Thanks for the additional data.


There is still some XUL components/code floating around, it's being replaced and reduced with each release.


Hmm, TIL. I was under the impression this work was already completed.


XUL is not supported for extensions now, but has Firefox's UI really been fully rewritten in HTML yet?


No. If you open the browser console and type `window`, you see:

    ChromeWindow chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
Visiting this link is funny by the way.

Does this complicate having a standalone Gecko though? Surely browser authors could write their own UI and embed Gecko inside without touching XUL.


> Let Google cripple their browser for themselves

Web developers can also help here by making the UX slightly worse for Chrome users, e.g. by showing more ads.


We want less dark patterns in software, not more


"This site best viewed with..."


I was thinking more of:

"Extra ads for Chrome users: ... Want less ads? Use ..."

Bonus for putting the extra ads in a pop-over div.


That makes no sense whatsoever for a business owner.


Not all websites are businesses.


> I feel like things would be easier if Firefox could be embeded in another browser just like chromium can.

Completely agree. I made my own little browser (with ad blocker built in to the network layer) using CEF simply because there was not an easy to use FF equivalent library.


I haven't seen this talked about here but... last I checked Mozilla was in majority funded by Google royalties. What's their plan of aligning their income with essentially directly attacking their funding source?


I guess Google could still be interested in being the default engine in Firefox even with ads and tracking blocked, since it would slow down alternatives from spreading.

I would be more comfortable in Mozilla not being founded by Google though.


They’re not attacking anything - I don’t think ad blockers block search ads, which are embedded into search results - and Firefox royalties have always been for search.


> I don’t think ad blockers block search ads

Of course they do.


uBlock Origin doesn't block search ads on DuckDuckGo.

Edit: Never mind; just had to fiddle around with the filters.




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