> On Feb 27, 2016, at 9:43 AM, Mike de Boer <mdeb...@mozilla.com> wrote: > > 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? >
The question "what do I think we should do for the web of tomorrow?” is certainly important for us to ask. However, one of the reasons that so many have been interested in an “embedded Gecko” solution like Electron/NW.js/whatever is so that we *can* begin experimenting with new things that may be a part of “the web of tomorrow”. It is simply not efficient or practical for many of us to spend a significant amount of time prototyping experimental features *directly* within Gecko. Especially when, if you look to other solutions like Electron or NW.js, the same thing can be achieved in a fraction of the time. If there is no easy way to reuse Gecko outside of Firefox proper, then it is not as much of a platform as it is a part of a product. Before I get criticized for that last sentence, I should clarify that yes, Firefox *is* a platform in the way that the web and all browsers are a platform. However, if Gecko cannot trivially exist in a different context outside of Firefox, then *Gecko* itself is not a platform. The fact that WebKit/Chromium is embedded in a variety of different applications that are not web browsers means that it is also perceived by many as a platform in and of itself. However, this does not mean that these applications do not make use of or benefit the web. With Electron or NW.js, a developer can build cross-platform native applications using web technologies that integrate deeply with various OSes. Hypothetically, in cases where several Electron apps might use a specific NPM package for some sort of OS integration that is not available to ordinary web content, this may highlight gaps in the web platform that we should probably fill. > 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. I believe many of us *will* start doing this since there doesn’t seem to be another option. However, I feel that it will reflect poorly on us if we start prototyping our ideas with a web platform implementation that we do not control. _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
