this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
1357 points (95.5% liked)
Technology
60135 readers
3733 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I heard the same - over a decade ago.
Not disagreeing with you, although that information might be outdated. But the fact that you don't see, e.g. , applications that use gecko to embed web content, speaks volumes. I get the feeling that their codebase is very monolithic.
I would really like to hear from a current or former contributor though.
https://web.archive.org/web/20191006213746/https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embedding_Mozilla/FAQ/Embedding_Gecko
It seems they cancelled support for embedding gecko.
As a previously paying, licensed Opera user I believe it was one of the reasons they went with chromium. Even Vivaldi (which is the true Opera) uses chromium. Giving up PWA support is another mistake.
On the chromium side, there is the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) which is used absolutely everywhere. Not sure about gecko situation though, but at least their JavaScript engine, SpiderMonkey, also has quite widespread use. I don't think I've seen projects not related with Mozilla/Firefox that use gecko though, but perhaps it's because I never look hard enough. It's usually either WebKit or CEF.
I believe libxul is their approach to having gecko as a separate library for others to use.