Firefox for Android is a great browser, bringing a modern HTML rendering engine to Android 2.2 and newer. One of the things we have been hoping to do for a long time now is make it possible for other Android applications to embed the Gecko rendering engine. Over the last few months we started a side project to make this possible. We call it GeckoView.

As mentioned in the project page, we don’t intend GeckoView to be a drop-in replacement for WebView. Internally, Gecko is very different from Webkit and trying to expose the same features using the same APIs just wouldn’t be scalable or maintainable. That said, we want it to feel Android-ish and you should be comfortable with using it in your applications.

We have started to build GeckoView as part of our nightly Firefox for Android builds. You can find the library ZIPs in our latest nightly FTP folder. We are in the process of improving the APIs used to embed GeckoView. The current API is very basic. Most of that work is happening in these bugs:

Bug 880119: Improve the API for GeckoView

Bug 880121: Add support for host application interfaces to GeckoView

Bug 880123: Add support for content callback interfaces to GeckoView

If you want to start playing around with GeckoView, you can try the demo application I have on Github. It links to some pre-built GeckoView libraries.

We’d love your feedback! We use the Firefox for Android mailing list to discuss status, issues and feedback.

Note: We’re having some Tech Talks at Mozilla’s London office on Monday (Oct 21). One of the topics is GeckoView. If you’re around or in town for Droidcon, please stop by.