[dfabulich]

> Embeddability has little to do with it; Chromium (as opposed to WebKit) isn't actually that embeddable.

No way. I remember the bad old days of XULRunner. In 2010, pre-Electron, it was literally easier to implement my own WebKit-based app from scratch in C++ than it was to follow the documentation and use XULRunner.

Firefox's embeddability was bad. Really bad.

[pcwalton]

And Chromium's embeddability is just as bad. Notice you're talking about WebKit, not Chromium. Chromium doesn't even have a XULRunner.

[dfabulich]

Chromium Embedded Framework is Chromium's XULRunner. It was much easier to use and maintain than XULRunner, which is why it's still maintained to this day, and XULRunner is in the trash.

[pcwalton]

CEF is a third-party project that isn't officially supported by Google, unlike XULRunner. Which gets back to my point about market share: when you're popular enough, then people will step in to provide embeddability (in this case, CEF) on top of your non-embeddable product (Chromium). You could easily imagine an alternate universe where Firefox was the #1 browser and someone stepped in to write a Gecko Embedded Framework. The reason why Chromium Embedded Framework exists and Gecko Embedded Framework doesn't is market share.