Just to make things clearer. Planula is not doing exactly what you proposed. It does not tries at all to emulate Electron, nor provide the same set of APIs. It does not try to be an HTML app-runtime neither.
Planula is an HTML browser experiment, running on top of *Firefox Nightly* (with a very small subset of patches that I need to upload to the repo...). It does not implies a new permission model, nor new APIs. Though it rely on mozbrowser iframes. Planula aims to be a very small shell around iframe mozbrowser. No features are really built-in, except tabs and an urlbar. The plan is to implement *all* features as WebExtensions. In this context a feature means: a download manager, a bookmark button + a bookmark manager, Firefox Hello, etc.. Basically I would like Planula to be a kind of dedicated sandbox to migrate Firefox bits out of XUL/XPCOM in an incremental manner. For example, this kind of sandbox can let us implement a particular feature (e.g the bookmark button) with pure web technologies, and then try to backport it to Firefox itself as a self-contained WebExtension. This is why Planula re-use as much as possible from Firefox, such as about: pages, devtools, etc... If Planula is ever maintained or used for what it is designed for, one of the last thing to do would be to convert <xul:browser> to <iframe mozbrowser>. This will require a bit of plumbing (parts of it beeing already done in bug 1238160 as jryan mentioned). Vivien. On Wed, Feb 24, 2016 at 9:19 PM, Benjamin Francis <bfran...@mozilla.com> wrote: > Hi, > > I've been thinking about working towards deprecating "Open Web Apps" (aka > mozApps > < > https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox_OS/API/Navigator/mozApps > >) > in Gecko. > > For the most part I think mozApps should eventually be replaced by > standards-based web apps using Web Manifest, Service Workers etc. I'd love > to see a standalone display mode for Firefox which supports these web apps > on desktop and mobile to replace the now defunct web runtime, but that's > not what this email is about. > > For the most privileged pieces of UI like the browser chrome of the > browser.html project and the Firefox OS system app I think we may need > another solution. I'd like us to be able to split Gaia > <https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia> into chrome (the system pieces) and > standard web content (everything else). (I'd also like to see a lot of the > current mozApps-only DOM APIs become web services). > > - In the past we had XULRunner but this has recently been removed and it > seems the continued use of XUL is being discouraged in favour of HTML. > - There was an attempt at rebooting the Chromeless project > <https://github.com/mikedeboer/chromeless2> but it looks like that was > still based on XULRunner. > - The browser.html <https://github.com/browserhtml/browserhtml/> > project > currently uses Graphene > < > https://github.com/browserhtml/browserhtml/wiki/Building-Graphene-%28Gecko-flavor%29 > >, > a build of Gecko/Servo which runs locally hosted web content as browser > chrome, but that's based on certified mozApps and the mozBrowser API. > > After chatting with members of the browser.html team I'd like to propose a > solution inspired by Electron <http://electron.atom.io/> (which they > already proposed <https://github.com/browserhtml/browserhtml/issues/639> > before <https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/7379>). This would involve a > new type of HTML-based chrome including a new <webview> element. > > Kan-Ru previously did a comparison > <https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/BrowserAPI/Common_Subset> of Mozilla's > mozBrowser API, Google's <webview> and Microsoft's <webview> and I started > to spec something out <https://github.com/benfrancis/webview/> with a view > to potentially standardising this, but the web lacks the security model > needed to expose this API and there's currently not much interest in a > standard. So my proposal is a chrome-only <webview> element for Gecko which > would replace the mozApps-only mozBrowser API > <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Using_the_Browser_API>, > along the lines of Electron's <webview> element > <http://electron.atom.io/docs/v0.36.8/api/web-view-tag/>, to allow you to > safely embed web content in an application with HTML-based chrome. > > We could also potentially emulate other parts of Electron's APIs too, see > their quick start tutorial > <http://electron.atom.io/docs/v0.36.8/tutorial/quick-start/> to get an > idea > of how their embedding works. > > Initially this would be used by the browser.html and Firefox OS projects, > but I think it could be a possible route away from XUL for Firefox in the > future too. > > I've chatted with a few people working on browser.html and Firefox OS about > this, but I'd like to get broader feedback. Vivien told me he's already > prototyping a similar solution <https://github.com/vingtetun/planula> to > the same problem so I'd like to kick off some discussion here about which > direction we should take. > > Thanks > > Ben > _______________________________________________ > dev-platform mailing list > dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform > _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
