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mozilla
qbrt
JavaScript2018–2021
mozilla / qbrt

qbrt

CLI to a Gecko desktop app runtime

6Distinct people
7Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
394GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

CLI to a Gecko desktop app runtime

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 4:00:59 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year7 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-01-04 11:08:46 UTC to 2021-08-30 17:21:36 UTC.

01232018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2021

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303

What Hacker News says

2 sources
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
In Brave launches 1.0
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
Read the rest
thub.com/paulrouget/servoshell I'm afraid this is it for now, since embedding Gecko is no longer unsupported by Mozilla. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embed... Hopefully, Mozilla will continue working on embeddable versions of desktop Gecko after they release the necessary improvements in Firefox.
In A web browser reference implementation using Mozilla Android Components

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