Hacker News Reader

Comment by phpisthebest | Hacker News Reader

No absolutely not...

That would be the worst thing for the web. Blink is objectively bad in the first place, and we need more than just chromiumum skins in the market.

I wish they would finish and move to Servo.

I wish Brave or some of the other Chromium Skins would become Firefox based.

Everyone consolidating down to Blink and Chromium is about the worst thing that could happen to anyone that desires an open Web

View on HN

>I wish Brave or some of the other Chromium Skins would become Firefox based.

This hurts because Firefox should have been that embedded framework powering browsers like Brave and electron apps. But that would have required them to invest in R&D to match performance but also to make their rendering engine easily embeddable (with a corresponding investment in documentation and outreach).

I believe that was a goal of servo, however it was starved for resources (just like the documentation project) in favor of foolish endeavors like Pocket, VPN Services, FireFox OS, and of course there many missteps in the world of Political Social Activism.

FirefoxOS was Brendan's project. Also, why don't you consider preventing gay people from marrying to be "Political Social Activism?" Why do you want to force Mozilla to have a leader who is a religious fundamentalist culture warrior?

Brendan's personal political donations were his own business unless he made it some organizational goal or priority for Mozilla, which he never did.

> Brendan's personal political donations were his own business

Eh, a CEO is a quasi-public figure. Those weren't his personal business entirely. (Consider a gay employee at Mozilla or partner.) That said, the solution was chastisement and a public apology. Not termination.

> the solution was chastisement and a public apology

Not all gays are in favor of gay marriage. The solution was to let him have his political opinions, and simply agree to disagree, like adults.

There was no evidence that Brendan discriminated against gay employees at Mozilla.

Conduct outside of work is considered for many jobs. And even Eich acknowledged he hurt people.

Brendan refused to apologize for the donation or even to acknowledge that it was wrong. Instead, he doubled down on it, saying in comments posted to this very forum that the gays kept asking for more and more rights, and he wasn't OK with that. It wasn't part of the previous bargain. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15966490

Given that he refused to apologize, and that the pesky freedom of association exists, which can lead to problems for Mozilla like the Montgomery Bus Boycott did for the public transit system in Montgomery, it was overall positive for Mozilla that Eich resigned. That doesn't mean that Mitchell is a good CEO. It just means that things would have been worse.

There was nothing for him to apologize for and his donation was not wrong.

> This hurts because Firefox should have been that embedded framework powering browsers like Brave and electron apps.

Years ago, Gecko had at least some support for being embedded within native applications.

This was apparently discontinued around 2011, though:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110403052816/http://www.h-onli...

https://web.archive.org/web/20210723183100/https://groups.go...

At that time, there were a number of browsers with native UIs that used Gecko, and software to help embed Gecko in other apps, such as:

Camino: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camino_(web_browser)

K-Meleon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-Meleon

Galeon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galeon

gtkmozembed: https://web.archive.org/web/20110505053545/http://www.mozill...

JavaXPCOM: https://web.archive.org/web/20100626110814/https://developer...

There was also XULRunner, too:

https://web.archive.org/web/20161201115812/https://developer...

Mozilla and Gecko had a staggering amount of potential back then, but it was squandered away, unfortunately.

There was a XULRunner-based media player too, I used it for a good while:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_(software)

Brave actually started out as a Gecko-based project - they were using some Gecko-based Electron equivalent, if memory serves. It was such a PITA to work with that they switched to a Chromium base.

>Blink is objectively bad in the first place

Do you mind explaining this statement?

There's always money in ~~the banana stand~~. Er, webkit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com