positron VS qbrt

Mozilla used to work on it: https://github.com/mozilla/positron

Currently I'm guessing https://tauri.app/ would be the easiest way to get away from electron.

They made an Electron-compatible replacement, Positron, discontinued.

Replacing Electron and rebuilding Discord from the ground-up would be quite the undertaking. What framework would you use? Firefox has tried to make an Electron-like framework in the past with Positron, but it has since been discontinued.

Mozilla Positron https://github.com/mozilla/positron

That way: * other browsers can base their engine on Firefox's * it's possible to make nodejs applications based on Gecko rather than Blink (i think it was called Positron) * other company can join and help them having an engine that is truely free and open source, where everybody can contribute and assure that the web standard is respected

Yeah, totally. Mozilla started something that would do just that, but it looks like it's been abandoned for a while. https://github.com/mozilla/positron Not sure if anyone's made a fork that's being maintained.

It’s been discontinued github/mozilla/positron

Firefox has project seperated from it's browser, just the problem is it never took off and only stay as... a relic of the past https://github.com/mozilla/positron

They did, twice. But they both were really unused.

I assume they meant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner, which was Mozilla's spiritual predecessor to Electron.

Some abandoned modern alternatives included Positron[1][2] and qbrt[3][4].

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 a XUL application" [5]

[1]: https://github.com/mozilla/positron

[2]: http://web.archive.org/web/20210227132731/https://mykzilla.o...

[3]: https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt

[4]: http://web.archive.org/web/20210601133844/https://mykzilla.o...

[5]: https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/#comme...

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.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework