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I still find the decision questionable. No embedding meant that Gecko missed out by default on the wave of embedded WebViews in the early smartphone era as well as the “desktop web stack” boom that Electron/CEF came to dominate.

Additionally, I believe that one of the reasons why Firefox has struggled to maintain market share is because it’s a bit of an acquired taste. Relative to Chrome, Safari, etc it’s kinda quirky and not to everybody’s liking. Alternative browsers wrapping Gecko could’ve helped a lot here.

Camino was a great example — Mozilla couldn’t justify building a Mac-specialized Firefox and that makes sense, so Camino filled that gap instead and became quite popular among Mac users. When Camino had to close up shop following the removal of embedding, most of those users didn’t switch to Firefox but instead to Chrome and Safari because those were better suited to their needs.

"Wasting resources on making even smaller special purpose web browsers integrate with the engine is not a move for a company that has been struggling with a lack of independent funding for years now."

So says the narrative. Mozilla has money, but prefer using it for C-Level salaries : Mitchell Baker raised her salary from 2.5M$ to 7M$ within 4 years, all the while laying-off developers and spending a shitload of money on seminaries and others BS expenses. Meanwhile, the market share of Firefox dropped.

And I assume you have noticed that privacy is not their main concern.

Such a pity because Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox brought a lot to the Web. But I guess this happens when Corporate people take over any organisation.

Yeah playing the whole corporate game really corrupted Mozilla. When you join them you start to think like them. And then it's game over.

It was US tax issues that forced them to go corporate but as a result of the Google deal. So they tricked them into going corporate.

>raised her salary from 2.5M$ to 7M$ within 4 years, all the while laying-off developers and spending a shitload of money on seminaries and others BS expenses.

Seminaries? Kagi turns up nothing. Could you explain?

Perhaps they meant seminars?

Who do you think writes the Book of Mozilla? Making a web browser requires a large supply of priests.

Except for Internet Explorer.

>Wasting resources

talking about Mozilla wasting resources is quite funny. Do you think having a competitor to Electron would be worse than

+ Pocket

+ LLM

+ VPN

+ https://mozillalifeboat.com/

any proof that they are losing money on VPN or Pocket? That's my only concern, if they're profitable they should live, if they are cost centers, drop them (obviously they're outside core mission of the browser, internet standards, internet freedom)

Diversifying the business so they're not dependent on Google is a good thing. I disagree with most of their business choices, but if the American DoJ gets its way, Mozilla will lose 86% of its funding next year.

As for Electron, I don't really care. I open most Electron apps in pinned Firefox tabs already.

As for the ones that integrate natively and can't run in the browser, Firefox is slower than Chrome so I'd rather have these 3MiB of JS apps ship with another slightly outdated copy of Chrome than with a slightly outdated copy of Firefox.

I think embedded gecko would have been the way they could answer electron, and that would have helped them stay relevant.

Mozilla Positron, their attempt at an Electron-compatible runtime on top of Gecko, did not pick up any traction and was cancelled.

That was quite late in the game, though. Kind of like closing the barn doors after the horses have already bolted.

It was released in 2016, only two years after Atom and Slack and a year after VSCode. Not sure I'd call that late.

By that point Electron had gained too much momentum and public mindshare to compete with without a big marketing push and flagship project at least as significant as Atom and VSCode were. Positron never got either.

Electron apps were popular, not Electron itself. Even now there are only 4-5 dozen popular apps using it, while I probably run across that number of Qt/GTK apps a month. It's a sort of weird dichotomy it finds itself it.

Mozilla XULRunner, which was the thing that happened before Electron, wasn't too bad though. It had way more traction than Positron. It died because Mozilla didn't care about it.

Well, and XULRunner was based in XUL, something Mozilla was trying to get rid of for very good reasons.

It did work with HTML though IIRC. (Well, given Firefox UI is now mostly HTML with some XUL sprinkled on top.)