Mozilla Drops Support for Gecko Embeds

Mozilla has always been the champion of open source, of community over revenue. If there's anyone mistreating the open source world it's Google with Android. And, yet, Mozilla is the one making a move that will affect several projects not directly associated with the organization, it's dropping support for embedding Gecko, the rendering engine used by Mozilla products, into other browsers or applications.

This means that any browser relying on Gecko is out of luck and is faced with very few options. Already, Gecko 2.0, the latest version is not embedable.

"Last summer, I led a session at the Mozilla summit to discuss whether and how we ought to continue supporting our various embedding efforts (gtkmozembed, javaxpcom, the ActiveX control, the NSView embedding widget, etc) given the effort involved in preserving their various degrees of code and binary compatibility with Mozilla core," Mozilla's Benjamin Smedberg wrote recently.

The conclusion was not a very optimistic one. Due to the complexity of maintaining embed support, the decision was made to drop it, at least for now. Implementing the various embed methods was hard enough and it hasn't been done properly at any point.

But now that Firefox is moving towards a multi-process architecture it would be significantly more complicated.

"As a project, we aren't going to spend effort trying to solve the problems associated with in-process embedding. Once separate-process rendering is implemented in Firefox, we may consider ways to make really simple multi-process embedding a possibility," Smedberg announced.

"If you are interested in helping to begin implementation of this multiprocess embedding solution, please let me know, and I will help guide you in the right direction," he added.

Basically, it means that projects using Gecko will either have to stick with the older Gecko 1.9.2, used in Firefox 3.6, or look for alternatives. Of course, they could start working on implementing embed support in Gecko 2.0 on their own, but that's not for the faint of heart.

One obvious alternative is WebKit. That's the option that Camino, a Gecko-based browser for Mac, is looking at. WebKit is already used by Safari and Chrome to name the biggest and is relatively easy to bolt into other products.