qbrt

I assume they meant XULRunner[0], which was Mozilla's spiritual predecessor to Electron. Some abandoned modern alternatives included Chromeless[1], Positron[2][3] and qbrt[4][5]. While technically possible using Firefox's XULRunner functionality (`firefox --app app.ini` — mostly undocumented, potentially unsupported in the future), as far as I can tell, Mozilla has abandoned the Electron approach for XUL/Gecko bundling, which is a shame since Firefox itself is basically just an implementation on top of the Gecko XUL runtime. > "[Firefox] is distributed as the combination of a Gecko XUL runtime — libxul, other shared libraries, and non-browser-specific resources like those in toolkit/ — plus a Firefox XUL application — mostly just the files in Contents/Resources/browser/, plus the 'firefox' stub executable that loads Gecko and points it at

The issue with this is that the more deeply customisable a fork would be the further it would stray from upstream (and by extension the more dev resources it would require to maintain). > I keep hearing the Firefox codebase isn't very modular and makes it hard to pursue such a project, and I don't doubt it. But aren't there enough of "us" out there to make a concerted effort? There's been plenty of people making such an effort, but yeah it does appear to be "hard". If you're interested in following previous work, some relevant links: - Overview of Myk Melez's efforts in this space https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/ - https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/ (official but Android-only) - https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt It may also be worthwhile reading about CEF which has become something of a defacto standard: https://en.w

Fair enough. Sorry, I should have clarified a bit more — I'm writing a cross-platform desktop application that has a preact[0] frontend (+ a Go backend) using `firefox --app application.ini`. I have been experimenting with performant lists (which is why I brought up the XUL tree — it's currently central to the interface, though not the final implementation for sure) — I'm currently only using the XUL window/menubar elements in order to populate the native macOS menubar. I am a fullstack web dev in my day job, so my goal here is to write a fast, easily extendable UI that I can quickly iterate upon using modern html/js/css/etc. I love gecko and used to write XUL add-ons many years ago, so I'm already familiar with JS code modules, XPCOM, XUL, the internal browser architecture etc. Basically, I'm now using XULRunner (`firefox --app applicati

As I understand it, Gecko is much harder to work with, so it would take a lot of time to make something like brave compatible with both Chromium and Gecko/Firefox's APIs (or to even only move to Gecko/FF). See the following comment from [0]: > More significantly, in my book: it’s difficult to use Gecko and Firefox in these ways. Even the simplest app requires substantial and arcane boilerplate. And the docs are comprehensive but outdated. The platform may be powerful, but it’s hard to use. There's also now qbrt[1], but the readme itself recommends not using it, and it was last updated 7 months ago. If this matures to a usable state, I can see Brave developers considering it. 0: https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/ 1: https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt

Originally, there was XULRunner, which was used in applications including ChatZilla, Google AdWords Editor, Komodo Edit, Pencil, Songbird, and Zotero. XULRunner has been discontinued. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/XUL... Mozilla briefly developed Positron, which was an Electron-compatible app shell that used Gecko instead of Chromium/Node.js/V8. Positron has also been discontinued. https://github.com/mozilla/positron The developer who was working on Positron went on to develop qbrt, which is a CLI interface to a Gecko app runtime. The project is unstable, and the last commit date is Jun 30, 2018. https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt Another Mozilla developer has a project called servoshell, which is an embeddable version of Servo. It's described as work-in-progress, and the last commit date is Jan 7, 2018. https://gi

https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt is a continuation from https://github.com/mozilla/positron - last commit 6mo ago though. Probably what is needed is a killer app - VS Code, Slack, Spotify...

Check out qbrt, a gecko app runtime by a mozilla engineer https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt I really hope it sees more development