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