[kwlug-disc] Firefox blasphemy: time to switch to Blink rendering engine?

[Doug Moen]

Firefox on iOS doesn't support browser extensions, as I believe this is prohibited by the app store rules. Ad blocking is allowed, but only using the iOS Content Blocker API. In general, apps are not allowed to download executable code, then execute it, but there is an exception relating to "user provided content" within a "content creation" app.

It would be difficult to share code between iOS Firefox and desktop firefox. The GUI has to be implemented using iOS APIs, can't use the Gecko rendering engine, can't use the Firefox javascript interpreter, can't implement browser extensions. Building portability frameworks is very expensive, and Mozilla is resource constrained. Whatever the reasons, it turns out that Firefox for iOS is a separate project written in Swift.
https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios

Chromium does a better job of sharing code between iOS and non-iOS, but it was years of work to achieve that. The iOS app started out as a separate project.
https://blog.chromium.org/2017/01/open-sourcing-chrome-on-ios.html

In short, your portable browser project sounds like a lot of work, and I bet the people who would be most interested in using it would not accept the restrictions of iOS.

On Tue, Mar 8, 2022, at 10:06 AM, Chris Frey wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 08, 2022 at 09:18:16AM -0500, Doug Moen wrote:
>> On iOS, WebKit is the only engine that is permitted
>> to be used. The "Firefox" and "Chrome" apps on iOS use WebKit.
>
> [...]
>
>> For me, Mozilla is that guy in the browser space.
>
> Those were two very interesting tidbits.  Thank you.  I didn't know
> about the "browser UN" with vetos. :-)
>
> As for all 3 browsers using WebKit, that opens up the other avenue
> of competition that I would like to see.  I didn't know about this
> either.
>
> In theory, I reason that if it is possible to make both Firefox and
> Chrome swap out their own engines in favour of a 3rd, then it should be
> possible to create a browser porcelain UI that can plug into all 3 sets
> of backend plumbing.
>
> This feels a lot like the GNU toolchain sitting on top of a Linux,
> FreeBSD, or Windows kernel.
>
> - Chris
>
>
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