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by jwells89 915 days ago
It would be interesting to see how Mozilla approaches implementing Gecko on iOS, with how the engine stripped support for embedding years ago (prior to which they could’ve used an approach similar to that seen in Camino[0]).

I guess they could take the approach of drawing the whole screen themselves but that’s going to make Gecko-based Firefox for iOS feel noticeably worse than the current WebKit/UIKit version in terms of responsiveness and such and might require some legwork to properly support VRR on 120hz iPhones (which is critical for battery life on those models).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camino_(web_browser)

2 comments

This would currently be against the App Store guidelines, which do not permit the use of a third party browser engine. Also, Firefox has ProMotion support.
Luckily that provision is going to be illegal under DMA within half a year.
Real Firefox has already been ported to iPhone, just not available in the App Store due to Apple's rules.
I thought Firefox on Android already did something similar to embedding, via GeckoView? The issue with embedding seemed to be that Mozilla really hated having complaints that their APIs were very unstable and kept breaking. In contrast, the IE embedding solid APIs were more stable (because they were also more limited, as I understand it).