If I remember correctly, it is much harder to use Firefox's components outside of Firefox than it is to do with Chromium/Blink. There is a reason why there is no relevant Electron alternative based on Firefox/Gecko. On Android the situation is different but not on any other platform: https://mozac.org/
Historically, Firefox has been the only moneymaker for Mozilla. It is possible they didn't want to make it easy to embed so anyone can create second FF on top of their work and compete without paying dues. Electron and single applications built fully on top of browser engine alone is relatively new, and possibily out of Mozilla's field of vision back then.
But, that is speculation, and I have no proof whatsoever other than tangential conclusions from Mozilla's blunders in recent years.
A much more realistic explanation would be that any software that isn't specifically designed in a decoupled way will be coupled at a million points and impossible to separate.
The only upside for Mozilla is that making Gecko available is the right thing to do. Which, for a nonprofit, matters, and I'm sure that having an Electron-equivalent is the kind of thing that would be considered cool by staff.
But there is the downside that it makes it easier to build browsers which would compete with Firefox for the shrinking niche that is "doesn't run Chrome or Safari". I guess you could make a case that such browsers would take at least as much share from Chrome as Firefox, maybe more even; but you could make the other case as well.
When you add the additional downside that it's probably many man-decades of work to do it at all, well, then it doesn't happen. Although the existence of GeckoView implies that Firefox and Gecko aren't as tightly coupled as they could be.
Isn't that the point? Making the engine decoupled and embeddable just wasn't on Mozilla's radar, and it suffered as a consequence.
Chrome team was advcied very early in their development by none other than Android team to go for WebKit because it was easier to work with. Not Presto, not Gecko. So at least since back then, thud feature was at least somewhat on Apple's list of priorities. I'm not sure if it got carried over from KHTML, but if it did, they didn't break it intentionally.
Back in IE horror days I remember using Avant Browser. It used IE to provide fancier features like tabs. I never remember Gecko anywhere in discussion for being a platform to build on top of, except for other Mozilla projects (FFOS, Thunderbird) that Mozilla dropped sooner or later.
Mozilla making money? LOL. Google just sends them spare change, pretending to pay for placement, to have an alt browser to show to antitrust authorities. Third-party use of Gecko satisfies that too.
So if someone else makes a browser off Gecko, then that one can satisfy Google's requirements, minus the special agreements Mozilla makes for search data, and suddenly there is mo reason for Google to pay Mozilla any more..
If Google stop paying for Gecko to track Chrome, it will lose feature parity, become unusable and fall out of use, where they can again be accused of monopoly. It seem unlikely someone doing a wrapper UI on a browser engine can fund that sisyphean task.
I am sorry but you are wrong. I remember times when first company forked WebKit to make their WebKit based browser (it was apple creating safari, or if my memory is wrong it was Google and their chrome). Mozilla foundation was much upset they didn't choose Gecko. But the company (Apple?) said it was because easiness of own implementation. Gecko was too hard to adapt.
Conkeror (basically Nyxt on xulrunner…exactly what the upper comment is asking about) used to be my browser of choice. It was baffling to me when they deprecated xulrunner. Like, why?
There was supposed to be an alternate way to do it (running with ‘firefox -app’ or something), but it was poorly documented and constantly breaking in new versions, so I eventually gave up.
They have Geckoview on Android but from what I've heard there was no interest in making that available for other platforms, and this was before they fired a ton of their technical staff. A shame really!
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.
I think that Mozilla has a project for decoupling the browser components but I'm not sure if it will result in further projects. The name was something like project Stylus, but I can't find it now and I might be wrong about the name.
