I was indeed working on such a project, codenamed ‘Chromeless2’. Then XULRunner got deprecated and that meant that Chromeless2 lost its base building block.
I’m passionate about the potential of the platform as a means to bring the web closer to the desktop, but the kind of pragmatism bringing change with the tech we currently have is not part of Mozilla today. Today it’s about the other side of the spectrum: where will the web be tomorrow? What can we do to get there first, in pole position? Discussing these topics is interesting and allows more rigorous decision making, like cancelling projects, much simpler to reason about. ‘Great or dead’ is not hard to understand, especially given the mindset that we strive to excel at moving the web forward. Hence, focus shifts more to usual suspects: (future) web standards, emerging technology (VR, IoT, etc) and stabilising the core (Rust, e10s). It’s arguably more interesting to work on these type of projects instead of the archaic desktop. Part of this is an image problem, as in Firefox Desktop is generally not deemed as sexy stuff to write code for; many developers - also within Mozilla - when they read ‘Firefox Desktop’, they see ‘XUL’, ‘Components.interfaces.nsIOMGIDontWantToBeHere’, ‘browser.js: 8000 LoC’ and recently ‘Electrolysis, electrolsys, electrol, electro-something’. Funny, isn’t it, that our most successful project ever is not sexy to work on? Personally, I see so many areas that I can have an impact on with my work that it startles me over and over. But I’m weird that way. It’s also about resources (read: money and other minor details). I think it’s very cool that Google is able to provide a good foundation for application frameworks like Electron with Chromium, however they don’t provide it to make Electron possible! They have their own consumer targeted products like ChromeOS/ ChromeBook that they need to support on the marketplace. And it takes a lot of resources to make that work. Our resources are quite modest. My own resources are also quite modest; if I had all the time in the world, I’d keep XULRunner alive single-handedly. Lately I find myself believing more and more in today’s Mozilla: what do I think we should do for the web of tomorrow? If we want to really deprecate XUL, what pieces of the puzzle do we currently miss? I wouldn’t feel any shame to use Electron for my next desktop app or prototype thing. You can’t really build a browser with it (please, spare me the Brave bravado, it’s saddeningly mediocre), but any other thing would probably be fine. With regard to Servo: I’d recommend to request info about the Browser.html project; it’s something that Paul Rouget bootstrapped, but I haven’t heard anything about it in a long, long time. I hope this helps, Mike. > On 27 Feb 2016, at 14:04, David Rajchenbach-Teller <dtel...@mozilla.com> > wrote: > > Unfortunately, this ship has sailed a long time ago. I didn't really > follow at the time, but I'm almost sure that there was a conscious > decision that Gecko == Firefoxen. While it makes the development of > Firefoxen easier, it pretty much killed the Mozilla Platform, including > embedding. > > These days, any mozEffort towards having a platform/embedding come > around Servo. > > Cheers, > David > > P.S.: I may be exaggerating a bit, I seem to remember that Mike De Boer > was working on his own on a project for developing applications with > Node + Gecko. > > On 27/02/16 11:11, Benjamin Francis wrote: >> I've been kind of taken aback at the lengths the platform team is willing >> to go to to prevent the platform being used by anyone. If Mozilla limits >> itself to just being about Firefox then I think we really will be going the >> way of the dinosaur. >> >> 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 _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
