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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

> It's a bit sad that Firefox is caving in and shipping a browser using WKWebView.

They don't have a choice, I'm glad to see them do something pragmatic here. On iOS you can ship a WKWebView browser or nothing. Given how big mobile has become it's sad that it took them 6+ years to do this. Lots of people use Chrome on iOS but that only came out 2 years ago. It could have been Firefox.

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It isn't sad. I'm happy that instead of caving into the demands of Apple they stuck out for as long as they did.

They still caved. It's just Safari with a Firefox skin on it. Just like all other iOS browsers. Mozilla had wanted to build a REAL Firefox browser for iOS, but Apple wants to lock everyone into Safari.

Oh yeah, I know that they caved and that Apple doesn't allow any other browser engines on iOS. I was just pointing out that they held out for a pretty long time.

There is much more to a browser in 2014 than just rendering HTML and running JavaScript.

True. But can a browser without its own rendering engine really be called a browser? To me, Firefox without gecko just isn't Firefox. But, to an end user that just wants their bookmarks to sync and doesn't care about choice, it doesn't really matter.

They have a choice, they can not release a browser for iOS.

they could release a firefox with gecko that works on jail broken ios ( or maybe it exists?)

There was one made about four years ago. Hardly anybody used it because hardly anybody jailbreaks their phones.

AFAIK, they never did. They did a launcher application that was sync-compatible to access all you bookmarks, etc.

It was built. Yesterday I was in the same room as the guy who built it. It was never officially released, however, due to the jailbreaking requirement.

Officially, there was Firefox Home, which was just a bookmarking thing and not a full browser.

It was barely gecko being ported. It had nothing close to a usable mobile UI.

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