muon

To be fair, Brave uses Muon, which is not really electron[1]. Muon is similar to Electron, in that it uses Chromium, but different as in, it's really pretty much Chrome[ium], not some hacked together fork, avoiding branches like 'upgrade-to-chrome-61' [2]. It also puts back in the security features from Chromium (ie, the Sandboxes[6]) and allows for Chrom(e|ium) extensions to run inside Muon directly. The Brave team have been working[3] pretty hard to re-unify Chrome[ium] into Electron. You could make the case that the UI is written in Javascript for Brave, but then again[4], Chrome calls Javascript code when you open a new tab[5], and renders out the New Tab content as HTML, so, what's the diff?... 1: https://github.com/brave/muon 2: https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/10213 3: https://github.com/brave/muon/commit/5e32814490ae33ee

The question is not about "XUL functionality" specifically, XUL is just an implementation detail, and html could work in its place just as well. The question is how much the extensions can do, in the old model they could do anything firefox code could do, in WebExtensions model, they can do only very limited set of things. On one hand it is quite sad to see firefox extensions go, on the other hand the old model was a maintenance hell both for firefox developers and for addon developers, because smallest changes in firefox ui were breaking bunch of addons, and even changes in addons themselves were breaking other addons, which all had incompatibilities and had to do lots of subtle hacks to work together. I have worked on firefox addons for several years, and had to quit firefox when they started ignoring addons and investing in old addon s

See http://kaiostech.com/. B2G lives, for now -- the "G" (for Gecko) part is not likely to last. Blonk, not Gonk, coming, I hope with Muon (https://github.com/brave/muon/) included, but the "Muonk" name goes too far ;-).

No need to fork Brave, we will collaborate on extensions APIs as we scale. We're supporting tested chromium extensions that we curate and fetch from our own S3 (essentially a cache backed by the Chrome Web Store). For an extension to get support, we need to rank it as in-demand, and then try adding it to Brave to see what missing chrome.* APIs it might need. https://twitter.com/bravesampson is leading this charge, using https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/projects/1 to keep track and engage with developers. For future extension APIs that go beyond the chromium ones, we won't support XUL, but I'd like to take advantage of our Muon (https://github.com/brave/muon - we forked Electron, because security) React.js-based front end. In 2Q2017 I'll hope to have more to say about extensions and where we'll go. Interested extension developers ar