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I wonder how difficult would be an open source community project whose explicit aim would be to take the Firefox code base and make it more modular and embeddable, like Chromium? Would it be too much work for a community effort?

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Electron, but based on Firefox instead of chrome.

Not the most appealing idea, but an interesting one. Might help move more people to essentially using Firefox.

Mozilla has been trying to build an Electron alternative based on Gecko, but it has been discontinued

https://github.com/mozilla/positron

They also had XULRunner… I was even lucky enough to have been using it in a professional context. Unfortunately it wasn't well supported; trying to submit patches was always painful, and framing issues as a Firefox bug was slightly more likely to get things merged. I imagine it's easier than landing changes in Chromium (because Electron is a completely separate project), at least.

Even if possible, such an initiative could only be successful if Mozilla supports it otherwise the “new” code will quickly go out of sync with the Firefox codebase.

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