Browsers in D

[Adam D Ruppe]

On Tuesday, 19 December 2023 at 22:42:16 UTC, Doigt wrote:
> Firefox is getting better, not worse. That's strictly your 
> opinion.

Firefox has a number of major problems:

* They invested in Rust instead of D.

* Its engine is not particularly embeddable. This means you're at 
the mercy of Mozilla's bad UI decisions. Something I was able to 
fix with the chromium engines with a simple

         url.addEventListener((DoubleClickEvent ev) {
                 url.selectAll();
                 ev.preventDefault();
         });

Has no solution for Firefox. This was a major strategic mistake 
on Mozilla's part: they could have been the base of countless 
tools and applications, but they ceded all this ground to their 
competition.

* They don't even support "app mode", to open one page in a 
window with its own icon and minimal ui, which could be a 
potential substitute for using its engine as an API; you can spin 
up a local web server and spawn an instance of the browser to 
display things. But firefox has very little support for this use 
case.

* The firefox engine has poor platform integration out of the 
box. Chrome's engine, on the other hand, works actually quite 
well in varied uses across platforms without requiring much 
custom code (they do break the X spec in places, but you can 
kinda tame that, you can see this in the source of the 
minigui_addons.webview module). Even if you could embed the 
firefox, it is possible it wouldn't work on your system anyway!


It is a pity that Mozilla didn't take this use more seriously, 
but they didn't...