Yep, but it seems to be a PITA. They endure whatever changes happen on Firefox UI, which are well tested on Firefox, but not on Thunderbird and Thunderbird has much more UI to manage than Firefox. See this interesting Thunderbird talk at FOSDEM on visual change that mentions this issue [1].

You also kinda have to fork Firefox to do this. It would be good to be able to #include <gecko-embedded-framework.h> and build the UI from there. XULRunner seemed nice too.

Using Gecko when you are not Firefox is such a pain that

- all alternative browsers that are not forks of Firefox that were based on Gecko have abandoned: they stopped being maintained, or switched to WebKit or Blink, which is a shame.

- all apps based on XUL / Gecko, like Songbird, have mostly disappeared.

It needs to be easier.

Gecko seems like a drag for Thunderbird. It shouldn't. For this, it needs to be a proper toolkit, with stability guarantees, and proper support to third party apps, and easily reusable. That's not the focus for Firefox devs though.

[1] https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2728-thun...

> all alternative browsers that are not forks of Firefox that were based on Gecko have abandoned: they stopped being maintained, or switched to WebKit or Blink, which is a shame.

Which browsers? Pale Moon, Basilisk, K-Meleon are still being developed.

They are all kind of pre-multiprocess/Rust Firefox forks. It seems Pale Moon has forked Gecko into Goanna and made it embeddable (which is neat!) and that's what K-Meleon uses too. Which I didn't know.

Is Goanna on part with web standards? Maintaining what seems basically a folk of an old Gecko must be hard.

It also kinda validates my point: using Gecko elsewhere is a PITA. You have to work hard to make it embeddable.

To answer your question, Gnome Web / Epiphany was once based to Gecko. It switched to WebKit because using Gecko was harder and harder. Konqueror optionally allowed you to use Gecko, but that stopped being possible a long time ago for the same reason. Galeon and Camino both died a long time ago.

Brave, Vivaldi & Co picked Chromium instead of Gecko. With Eich coming from Mozilla, I think Brave considered Gecko but that was deemed too hard.

Brave was originally based on a Gecko-based Electron-alike. I think it was called Muon?

No, it was based on Blink: https://github.com/brave/muon

Muon was our Electron fork (μ− is heavy e-), but Brave started on Gecko:

https://brianbondy.com/blog/174/the-road-to-brave-10

Is it based on the current version? I though it was based on the old XUL based Firefox.

They've moved (or still moving?) from XUL to a regular HTML/CSS/JS stack.

They are tracking recent versions of Firefox.