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0 pointsevasb2y ago0 comments

With Mitchel Baker at helm, all the initiatives that would make Firefox more embeddable were cancelled to cut cost.

Now Firefox can't be used to make webapps effectively, the only alternative is to use Electron and fortify Chromium's monopoly.

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pseudalopex2y ago

> With Mitchel Baker at helm, all the initiatives that would make Firefox more embeddable were cancelled to cut cost.

Will you name them? Mozilla cut embedding when Gary Kovacs was CEO. XULRunner, Graphene, and Positron were cut when Chris Beard was CEO. GeckoView was not cut.

fabrice_d2y ago

I'm not a Baker fan at all, but no such initiative was cut under her leadership, because none existed.

Electron won not because chromium was more embeddable, it won because it made it easy to pull hundred of MB of nodejs dependencies. Everything else you could do already before with XulRunner...

nine_k2y ago

> it made it easy to pull hundred of MB of nodejs dependencies

That's exactly what "more embeddable" is. It made itself easier to turn into Node.js, Electron, etc. I don't think it was a pure coincidence.

fabrice_d2y ago

XulRunner existed before Electron. Node.js used v8, but could have use SpiderMonkey instead (this is what Gnome did). These were choices, not situations where using Mozilla tech was impossible. In the end that cemented Google stronghold on the web.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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pseudalopex2y ago

> With Mitchel Baker at helm, all the initiatives that would make Firefox more embeddable were cancelled to cut cost.

Will you name them? Mozilla cut embedding when Gary Kovacs was CEO. XULRunner, Graphene, and Positron were cut when Chris Beard was CEO. GeckoView was not cut.

fabrice_d2y ago

I'm not a Baker fan at all, but no such initiative was cut under her leadership, because none existed.

Electron won not because chromium was more embeddable, it won because it made it easy to pull hundred of MB of nodejs dependencies. Everything else you could do already before with XulRunner...

nine_k2y ago

> it made it easy to pull hundred of MB of nodejs dependencies

That's exactly what "more embeddable" is. It made itself easier to turn into Node.js, Electron, etc. I don't think it was a pure coincidence.

fabrice_d2y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse