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by ianb 4661 days ago
Same idea from a different direction: Firefox OS currently includes a browser built in HTML: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gaia/Browser with an API: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/BrowserAPI

Of course it's embedded in Firefox OS, but Firefox OS is really just Firefox built with special options, so in theory with some work you could expose that BrowserAPI to desktop. And there's actually a viable path whereby you could create a new browser as an open web app (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Apps) with the permissions to use the BrowserAPI and it could be installed as a normal application, including on desktop. Of course that's a bunch of steps and unimplemented bits, but you'll be following a path that "upstream" is actually committed to. So committed they actually made just what you describe ;) (Even though the design of the browser is pretty conventional – but it's the concept of a browser-built-on-html that you are exploring at this point.)
2 comments
spolu 4661 days ago
I'm glad things are moving in the right direction. Yet there are a few things missing in the current BrowserApi to really enable new browsing experiences IMO, such as network delegates, acces to cookies and local storage.

Still really awesome. Thanks for sharing that. Are you involved with this?

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ianb 4661 days ago
I work at Mozilla, but not with Firefox OS.

The BrowserAPI is certainly not complete, but it's something. Some stuff might be harder than others. Intercepting networking is not very easy in Firefox – you can spy on networking, but the code isn't setup with hooks to change it up. And I don't know if something like localStorage would be exposed via the BrowserAPI – it's more low-level than that sort of thing. But if you are thinking about moving that kind of state around there's another Mozilla project called PiCL: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/PiCL – it's working more in the guts of Firefox, but like much of Firefox it's in Javascript (compared to Chrome which is more biased towards C++). But it's not nearly as friendly an environment as content Javascript :( Anyway, that's more where localStorage manipulation and transportation is going to be happening in Firefox.

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spolu 4661 days ago
Awesome info again! Thanks so much I'll look into it closely!
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piranha 4661 days ago
Browser on WebOS was implemented similarly, using html and js to build controls and an html page (inside iframe maybe, not sure about this part).
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