Over in Positron, we’ve implemented enough of Electron’s <webview> element to run the basic browser app in this collection of Electron sample apps. To try it out:
git clone https://github.com/hokein/electron-sample-apps
git clone https://github.com/mozilla/positron
cd positron
./mach build
./mach run ../electron-sample-apps/webview/browser/
I’m really very confused these days about Mozilla’s desires to have their platform used as the base for other projects. As a leader in the Thunderbird project, which clearly is the biggest platform user for Mozilla, this is a critical issue.
If someone were to ask my opinion about Mozilla as a good platform base for a non-Firefox project, I would say that nobody in their right mind would rely on the Mozilla platform as a base for something other than Firefox based on our situation. We want to use the Mozilla platform, but we feel pressure to stop doing so, even though we are very successful by any reasonable standard for an open-source project.
Yet that understanding of Mozilla does not explain Positron. Perhaps you could explain why Positron, when the theme at Mozilla that I have been able to figure out is that they have no interest in maintaining the kinds of stable APIs that would be required for third parties to use anything based on the Mozilla platform.
If Positron makes sense, doesn’t it make sense for Thunderbird, and wouldn’t adapting Thunderbird to run on Positron be a boon for you? Yet I feel that would be a tough sell, both within Mozilla and within the Thunderbird community. Why is that?
R Kent James: The initial goal of Positron is merely to run Tofino, the browser interaction experiment that is based on Electron. We don’t currently have any goal beyond that. I’ve described this goal, and the milestones along the way to it, in this Positron roadmap:
https://github.com/mozilla/positron/wiki/Roadmap
To the question of whether Positron makes sense for Thunderbird: I don’t think it does, primarily because Positron doesn’t currently intend to support more general use cases. That could change in the future, of course; but it isn’t the case today.