Gecko

Firefox engine is.

Gecko? Yeah, it is.

Oh, so this is one of those downstream Firefox forks, then?

Think of it as a downstream of Firefox that's inspired by the UX of Arc Browser.

So it's Gecko rendering engine...

but with a slightly nicer, more modern UI.

So vertical tabs, a bunch of pinned tabs at the top left, which I now use for things like Telegram web or WhatsApp web, or my Gmail's always there as an example.

So it stopped me having to install a million client applications for chat things onto my machine, and I have those as pinned things at the top now.

But effectively, the WebDriver protocol is a relatively simple HTTP-based protocol between the driver, which is the name of the thing that sits either within the browser or next to the browser.

So, for example, for Firefox, it's called GeckoDriver.

For Chrome, it's called ChromeDriver.

For Safari, I think it's called WebKitDriver.

You start Firefox, then you start Gecko driver, and then you connect to the port the Gecko driver is running on.

You can also usually tell these to say, you don't need to start Firefox yourself.

You start GeckoDriver and you say, point it at this Firefox binary.

And you say, whenever you need to start a new browser session, start this binary and then instrument it in however you do that behind the scenes.

Like my surface of when I'm wearing my earbuds versus I'm looking at my phone versus I'm sitting in my car versus I'm wearing my VR goggles or whatever it might be.

And so in a lot of ways, I'm already excited because people talk to us about all the time of taking the Gecko rendering engine and embedding it in a bunch of different places because...

Gecko is fairly lightweight and it renders really well.

Can we use that in a car scenario? Can we use that in an airplane scenario? Can we use that in the smartphone scenario? So I think like our technology is sort of like going to all these different places, which gives us a foothold to make sure that all these pieces of technology stay open as well.

So I think that like we'll be continuing to proliferate because I don't believe we get to a single place.

And so that kind of kills it for me.

But what's so sad about that is that it had all of my favorite features of Firefox while not using Gecko and absolutely not using the Chromium engine, which meant that it was a real true competitor in the browser space to Firefox and the Chromiums.

And I say the chromiums because there's like a bajillion of them

these days.

It's a good day for HTTP, HTML.

Back to business.

Get on a Gecko.

Get on a Firefox.

Now it is a bit disappointing, I had some hopes for that browser because it was the only one that looked like a Linux application using GTK and Libidwaiter and that was cool that we're stuck with browsers that look nothing like our desktops which is a bit annoying Hopefully in that code there are some things that could be useful as a building block maybe for Epiphany, GNOME web or other webkit based browsers.

I do think we need more engines than Gecko and Blink so having something working on that would be neat.

I'll be looking at Servo then I guess.

Now let's talk a little bit about ditching big tech because as much as I like seeing the EU's efforts to drop Microsoft services it doesn't mean that everything is going smoothly with those efforts and one transition apparently is not going well.