In retrospect, it seems that Mozilla's biggest stumble was their decision to ignore embedding. Around 2009-ish, the decision was made to break any compatibility guarantees for embedding, at first temporarily (which was necessary until new APIs that could support multiprocess in the engine), and then the idea was that you wouldn't embed Gecko at all, and instead use XULRunner. Then XULRunner was killed off for Firefox webapps, which itself was killed off for... nothing?
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.
The interesting thing about Electron was that it was produced by a group independent of Google. If Mozilla spun off XULRunner as a subsidiary and allowed them to make decisions on marketing, there’d be actual competition.
(There’s also not much point to disabling XUL extensions entirely since Firefox now requires extensions to be signed).
Re:Thank you, Chris
by Ididntdothis on Thursday August 29, 2019 @04:16PM
(#20833200)
Maybe they hired some product managers from Microsoft :). I mean the ones that managed the whole mess with Winforms, WPF, WinRt, silverlight and UWP
Or they could be innovative with their browser. Sometimes I have trouble telling chrome and Firefox apart. They are so similar.