Embedding Gecko Into Other Apps Isn't Pretty

Mozilla developer Chris Lord wrote recently about renewed interest in embedding Gecko, the current Mozilla layout engine used by Firefox and Thunderbird, while today he's out with a new post about the state of embedding Gecko into other applications.

Lord's post today covers the Gecko embedding solutions of EmbedLite/IPCLite, Spidernode, and GeckoView. However, his short version of the blog post is "there are no first-class Gecko embedding solutions as of writing."

You can read the post in full via State of Embedding in Gecko. The post does cover some future possibilties for making it better and easier to embed Gecko for other use-cases, but so far Mozilla isn't investing any new efforts into that direction. While Mozilla's next-gen Servo engine has Chrome/Chromium CEF compatibility, Chris Lord is hoping developers will also move toward supporting an external CEF-compatible library for Gecko and that more developers will work on maintaining a fork of Node.js with Mozilla's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine.