I think that was a fine decision by Mozilla, even if I'm not happy with it. Firefox is already a web browser with barely enough market share to support it. 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.
Of course the decision was made back in the Firefox 5 days, but back then Chrome was rapidly growing, mostly at the cost of Firefox. Had Firefox remained embeddable, I think it would've only been held back in important performance areas like threading and rendering because of the API around the web view.
Interesting enough, with the Firefox for Android rewrite, Mozilla actually went back to making Gecko embeddable: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/GeckoView This design decision is also claimed to be the reason for them to disable about:config in production builds, because misconfiguring geckoview can disconnect it from the app and leave users with a broken browser (apparently).
So now there is an official way of embedding Gecko in your application, but it's limited to Android only.
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.
>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?
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.
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)
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.
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.
Of course the decision was made back in the Firefox 5 days, but back then Chrome was rapidly growing, mostly at the cost of Firefox. Had Firefox remained embeddable, I think it would've only been held back in important performance areas like threading and rendering because of the API around the web view.
Interesting enough, with the Firefox for Android rewrite, Mozilla actually went back to making Gecko embeddable: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/GeckoView This design decision is also claimed to be the reason for them to disable about:config in production builds, because misconfiguring geckoview can disconnect it from the app and leave users with a broken browser (apparently).
So now there is an official way of embedding Gecko in your application, but it's limited to Android only.