It always has been. The fact that it mostly wasn’t noticed for decades should give pause to some of the criticism of web tech as a way to present UI in native apps.

It's definitely not gone unnoticed. It's the entire reason why Gecko-based native browsers like Camino[0], K-Meleon[1], and the since-turned-WebKit Epiphany[2] existed alongside Firefox. The only reason those ceased to exist is because Mozilla elected to kill Gecko embedding (which in retrospect, also set the stage for Blink and WebKit's dominance with how important embedding would become).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camino_(web_browser) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-Meleon [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Web

Yeah I chose “mostly unnoticed” very purposefully. I used Camino (even when it was Chimera!) because I wanted the native UI it offered. At the time, the vast majority of Mac software was either Cocoa, or ported to Carbon from classic Mac OS, or some Java monstrosity. The tech crowd either didn’t know or didn’t care that Mozilla/Firefox used XUL/web tech to implement its UI, and my preference for the native interface was outlandish to most of my tech peers at the time.

500 megs for the browser subprocess is also party of the insanity.

I believe the Firefox UI is mostly standard web components and CSS these days.

"This means that (modulo a few exceptions documented below) all the Firefox UI is using regular web technology to render (mostly CSS flexbox)."