Alright, you don't have to engage. I thought maybe I missed something before my time.
For others and historians :) … some efforts were made I think around 2008 (by Brad L. and/or Mark F. … I don't remember so well). A shortlived GTK widget was attempted at some point.
But this lead to nowhere because… well, it's hard to bend Gecko that way, because, again, Gecko was not designed to be embedded. And also because leadership was not pushing into that direction.
About the "not designed that way", what I mean is this:
We had many abstractions for sure to make it multi-platform (and that was amazing achievement, really) but embedding requires mechanisms to hook the event loop and the rendering pipeline into the embedder, in an agnostic way. Which is the part that was missing in Gecko.
Webkit had a proper, well designed, embedding story.
For others and historians :) … some efforts were made I think around 2008 (by Brad L. and/or Mark F. … I don't remember so well). A shortlived GTK widget was attempted at some point.
But this lead to nowhere because… well, it's hard to bend Gecko that way, because, again, Gecko was not designed to be embedded. And also because leadership was not pushing into that direction.
About the "not designed that way", what I mean is this:
We had many abstractions for sure to make it multi-platform (and that was amazing achievement, really) but embedding requires mechanisms to hook the event loop and the rendering pipeline into the embedder, in an agnostic way. Which is the part that was missing in Gecko.
Webkit had a proper, well designed, embedding story.
We didn't.