Gecko had a good and honorable run, but no longer sparks joy. It's not a differentiator, which means that the resources you're applying to it are a waste of time and money.
Please thank Gecko for serving its purpose in our lives and let it go, before its reputation gets worse. Firefox's market share has slipped so far that most web developers no longer test with it.
Adopt and contribute to WebKit. Focus on things that matter.
Mentioning Gecko repeatedly without mentioning WebRender, the rendering engine that many users are using today in Firefox, and which will become the default/only rendering engine at some point in the future,[0] makes it seem that you have no idea about what you are speaking of.
Yes, WebRender makes up the compositor portion of the browser rendering engine. A very large, critical portion of it. Thus, saying "Gecko had a good and honorable run" is disingenuous to the large-scale changes and progress the developers have made (and continue to make) on the rendering engine.
I think you think I hate Gecko. In fact, I've used it since it was NGLayout and think it's one of the most important pieces of software in computing history. I have deep respect for the world-class engineers working on WebRender and other Gecko components.
I simply think that it's time has come. Remember that Mozilla itself once intended to replace Gecko with Servo.
I have no doubt that WebRender is brilliant, but WebRender will not save Gecko, and Gecko will not save Firefox.
If Firefox is worth saving — and I think that with hard choices, its decline can be reversed — then Gecko and its components are non-differentiating ballast that must be dropped if the balloon is to get over the mountain. IMHO, of course.
Gecko had a good and honorable run, but no longer sparks joy. It's not a differentiator, which means that the resources you're applying to it are a waste of time and money.
Please thank Gecko for serving its purpose in our lives and let it go, before its reputation gets worse. Firefox's market share has slipped so far that most web developers no longer test with it.
Adopt and contribute to WebKit. Focus on things that matter.