qbrt VS Fenix

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

It's been that way for years: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/20351

I lost hope it and other issues would be fixed and moved to Chromium on Android.

Firefox for Android was rewritten pretty much from scratch circa 2020. Collections are one of its many unfinished and poorly-thought-out features, and they never got around to implementing the ability to sync Collections to desktop. It was a known problem in 2019, while the rewrite was being worked on, and Mozilla doesn't appear to have given it any attention in the years since.

People have been asking for this for over a year via Mozilla's current feedback channels, and for two years on the previous issue-reporting venue, to no avail. It was automatically moved from the old venue to Bugzilla ostensibly because Bugzilla makes it easier to track and work on issue reports, but they haven't actually worked on that issue report at all.

Known issue, not a new issue, and unlikely to be fixed any time soon, unfortunately. I had this before I stopped using the Android version a year ago. It was reported as a bug at least a year ago on their old issue tracker, and later moved to the current one, where last activity on the issue report was three months ago. No apparent progress toward any fix.

Since Fenix's first release they've been saying that the absurd limitations on add-ons support were only temporary, and they would have quickly increased the number of supported ones.

And instead absolutely nothing changed for three years.

Furthermore the insane bugs from which Fenix suffers from its release (https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/12731) (making it unbearable) have been left hanging, focusing the few resources on dumb ui experiments.

So everything suggested that Mozilla did not care of its Android browser, or actually that they were deliberately sabotaging it.

This news instead represents a huge improvement, hence my bewilderment.

I don't know what people who downvoted my message thought I meant.

https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/20012 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=101865

This was sadly deprecated on Android: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/12099

It was such a huge loss for me that for at least a year I used the outdated pre-Fenix. Now they still work on Desktop but they just stopped working on Android (althouth the bookmarks itself are synced-up)