What does HackerNews think of positron?

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.

Mozilla has been trying to build an Electron alternative based on Gecko, but it has been discontinued

https://github.com/mozilla/positron

I assume they meant XULRunner[0], which was Mozilla's spiritual predecessor to Electron.

Some abandoned modern alternatives included Chromeless[1], Positron[2][3] and qbrt[4][5].

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" [6]

On Android, there is also Geckoview[7][8] for embedding gecko.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner

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

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

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

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

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

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

[7]: https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview

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

Yes. There was an experimental project called Positron [0]: "a experimental, Electron-compatible runtime on top of Gecko". It was discontinued in 2017 [1].

AFAIK the only thing around nowadays is GeckoView [2] for Android.

[0]: https://github.com/mozilla/positron [1]: https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/ [2]: https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/

Fair enough.

Sorry, I should have clarified a bit more — I'm writing a cross-platform desktop application that has a preact[0] frontend (+ a Go backend) using `firefox --app application.ini`.

I have been experimenting with performant lists (which is why I brought up the XUL tree — it's currently central to the interface, though not the final implementation for sure) — I'm currently only using the XUL window/menubar elements in order to populate the native macOS menubar.

I am a fullstack web dev in my day job, so my goal here is to write a fast, easily extendable UI that I can quickly iterate upon using modern html/js/css/etc.

I love gecko and used to write XUL add-ons many years ago, so I'm already familiar with JS code modules, XPCOM, XUL, the internal browser architecture etc.

Basically, I'm now using XULRunner (`firefox --app application.ini` as previously mentioned — will eventually be stubbed into a native macOS .app/OS program) as a replacement for Electron / Chromium Embedded Framework[1].

I'm basically doing the same thing as Positron[2]/qbrt[3].

[0]: https://preactjs.com/

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework

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

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

A Firefox based Electron was tried: Positron. It was scrapped for some reason or other (lack of traction?): https://github.com/mozilla/positron

They worked on it a bit [0] but it has been abandoned along with all the other embedding efforts over time. As someone who embeds Chromium (via CEF) only because it's easy, I would really appreciate (and have been shouting into the wind about) focus on the embeddability of Gecko.

0 - https://github.com/mozilla/positron

XULRunner was killed off for webapps, which was killed off for https://github.com/mozilla/positron, which was killed off for nothing.

On the bright side, Servo is designed for embedding, although it's a lot more work than something like XULRunner or Electron.

Originally, there was XULRunner, which was used in applications including ChatZilla, Google AdWords Editor, Komodo Edit, Pencil, Songbird, and Zotero. XULRunner has been discontinued.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/XUL...

Mozilla briefly developed Positron, which was an Electron-compatible app shell that used Gecko instead of Chromium/Node.js/V8. Positron has also been discontinued.

https://github.com/mozilla/positron

The developer who was working on Positron went on to develop qbrt, which is a CLI interface to a Gecko app runtime. The project is unstable, and the last commit date is Jun 30, 2018.

https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt

Another Mozilla developer has a project called servoshell, which is an embeddable version of Servo. It's described as work-in-progress, and the last commit date is Jan 7, 2018.

https://github.com/paulrouget/servoshell

I'm afraid this is it for now, since embedding Gecko is no longer unsupported by Mozilla.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embed...

Hopefully, Mozilla will continue working on embeddable versions of desktop Gecko after they release the necessary improvements in Firefox.

There was one started called Positron, but it was discontinued in early 2017. https://github.com/mozilla/positron

> Servo was designed to be embeddable, why for instance not attempt competition for Electron.

It should be noted there have been side projects to back nodejs with spidermonkey [0] and have electron APIs backed with gecko [1].

I agree with you and the thing I want more than anything is a cross platform browser engine embeddable with a supported C API that's not Chromium. Servo was on its way, but work has definitely slowed. But I acknowledge that even though I would build my own browser UI on top of an embeddable gecko engine, it probably won't affect adoption that much to be worth the effort.

0 - https://github.com/mozilla/spidernode 1 - https://github.com/mozilla/positron

Latest commit on Mar 8, 2017

https://github.com/mozilla/positron

> This is what makes me want to see something like Electron developed over Firefox internals.

Tried, but abandoned presumably based on prioritization: https://github.com/mozilla/positron. I was hoping Servo would help here, but from the outside looking in, the pieces are being moved into FF proper and the Servo browser's priorities have been reshifted to being a part of the VR team. Sure they're still making a general use browser (and that's quite a feat), but the embeddability game may suffer (I believe conforming to the CEF iface that was there original goal has become stale).

They tried: "This project is an Electron-compatible app shell for creating desktop apps based on Gecko, the rendering engine used in Firefox." https://github.com/mozilla/positron

but they failed: "As noted in the blog post Positron Discontinued [1], this project has been discontinued. The source remains available, and you're welcome to reuse it." [1] https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/

I believe you're looking for Positron:

https://github.com/mozilla/positron

It already exists: https://github.com/mozilla/positron

https://github.com/mozilla/positron is a thing, though not under active development right now.

The alternative mentioned in the article is React Native, which runs on iOS/Android/Ubuntu/OSX/Windows.

Another lightweight alternatives to Electron are: Mozilla Positron (https://github.com/mozilla/positron), Webkit for Android/Windows (https://github.com/daewoong-jang/webkit-android) and Qt Quick (https://www.qt.io/qt-quick/).

1) Tofino (which has now ended) was just an experimental testbed for trying some new browser concepts. It was easier for them to use Electron than to contend with Gecko's ossified embedding APIs. Hopefully positron (https://github.com/mozilla/positron) will allow us to use Gecko in the future.

2) Firefox iOS uses WebView not by choice, but because of Apple's App Store restrictions.

It's not good; people use Electron instead of XULRunner because XULRunner was barely maintained. It would randomly stop working on major Firefox releases, and would stay broken for weeks, because nobody noticed or cared that XULRunner didn't work, as long as core Firefox kept working.

Even when it did work, working with XPCOM sucked.

Positron https://github.com/mozilla/positron is the new XULRunner. WIP, doesn't actually work yet. :-(

As others have mentioned, while this article is about Test Pilot and focused around how you can help with UX experiments, there are lots of wonderful devs hard at work on platform features.

Some are just starting to land after literally years of work:

You might be more interested in reading about platform improvements like getting Servo/Rust components into Gecko: https://blog.servo.org/2016/05/09/twis-62/

Or progress in multi-process support (codename e10s): http://arewee10syet.com/

While these are focused on Firefox to improve performance, stability and responsiveness, there are also experiments like the Positron project, which is making Gecko able to host Electron applications: https://github.com/mozilla/positron