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An honest question: we're seeing many "independent" browsers that are basically a wrapper around Chromium (Brave, Vivaldi, even Edge now) -- does anyone know why there aren't any (that I know of) similar initiatives based on Firefox?


Gecko is much harder to embed. I've seen a few projects, but they aren't anywhere as good. Chromium had Chromium Embedded Framework long before Electron showed up. The dual-nature of Chrome/Chromium meant that the project was always configurable much more easily.

Mozilla doesn't support embedding Gecko these days: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embed...

>Embedding of Gecko is no longer supported. If you currently embed Gecko, you should use an alternate solution, because you will not be able to pick up new security improvements.

They are supporting GeckoView[1], but that's android only.

CEF: https://bitbucket.org/chromiumembedded/cef/src/master/

[1]: https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/


The Gecko engine is notoriously beastly to build and be wrapped or embedded. Mozilla tried to improve the situation at various points but seem to have since determined that it’s not worth the effort.


There are a few, like GNU IceCat or the Tor Browser.


Those are basically patch sets for Firefox. Brave, Vivaldi, and Edge only use the same engine.




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