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> It's a bit sad that Firefox is caving in and shipping a browser using WKWebView.

They don't have a choice, I'm glad to see them do something pragmatic here. On iOS you can ship a WKWebView browser or nothing. Given how big mobile has become it's sad that it took them 6+ years to do this. Lots of people use Chrome on iOS but that only came out 2 years ago. It could have been Firefox.



It isn't sad. I'm happy that instead of caving into the demands of Apple they stuck out for as long as they did.


They still caved. It's just Safari with a Firefox skin on it. Just like all other iOS browsers. Mozilla had wanted to build a REAL Firefox browser for iOS, but Apple wants to lock everyone into Safari.


Oh yeah, I know that they caved and that Apple doesn't allow any other browser engines on iOS. I was just pointing out that they held out for a pretty long time.


There is much more to a browser in 2014 than just rendering HTML and running JavaScript.


True. But can a browser without its own rendering engine really be called a browser? To me, Firefox without gecko just isn't Firefox. But, to an end user that just wants their bookmarks to sync and doesn't care about choice, it doesn't really matter.


They have a choice, they can not release a browser for iOS.


they could release a firefox with gecko that works on jail broken ios ( or maybe it exists?)


There was one made about four years ago. Hardly anybody used it because hardly anybody jailbreaks their phones.


AFAIK, they never did. They did a launcher application that was sync-compatible to access all you bookmarks, etc.


It was built. Yesterday I was in the same room as the guy who built it. It was never officially released, however, due to the jailbreaking requirement.

Officially, there was Firefox Home, which was just a bookmarking thing and not a full browser.


It was barely gecko being ported. It had nothing close to a usable mobile UI.




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