Last month I blogged about Why Embedding Matters, and then I described a variety of Embedding Use Cases. Here are some projects that would address those cases. If you could choose, which would you do first?

Embedding Framework for Headless Browsing

An Embedding Framework for Headless Browsing would enable internal Gecko testing frameworks, scriptable browsers like SlimerJS, and other tools that automate web page interactions to do so without having to display them in a visible window (or jump through hoops to avoid doing so).

It would be available for all shipping versions of Gecko in Firefox (Nightly, Aurora/DevEdition, Beta, Release). It would support all three major desktop OSes (starting with Linux, which is popular for testing websites in continuous integration). It might provide a command-line flag for running Firefox headlessly (as Chrome is planning to do).

Desktop Browser Runtime

A Desktop Browser Runtime is a specialized application runtime that would address the Hybrid Desktop Web Browser use case. It could also be used to build Site-Specific Browsers.

It would provide core OS APIs (file I/O, networking, process management, etc.) along with desktop integration (windows, menus, application lifecycle, etc.). It would also include an API to load and manage untrusted web content in isolated frames.

It might integrate Node.js using SpiderNode, both to provide core APIs and to enable access to an ecosystem of third-party modules. And it might support WebExtensions by default and provide a service (like the User-Agent Service in Tofino) for storing, querying, and retrieving browsing data.

WebView for Android and iOS

A WebView for Android would provide a Gecko equivalent to Android’s WebView class. It would enable Android app developers to build Hybrid Mobile Apps for Android as well as Native Android Apps that incorporate web content. A WebView for iOS would do the same thing as the WebView for Android project, but for iOS, to provide the equivalent of its WKWebView class.

Embedding Framework for Desktop

An Embedding Framework for Desktop would support web content rendering in native desktop apps, including application frameworks like the Desktop Browser Runtime. It might provide a measure of compatibility with existing APIs for embedding rendering engines, like the Chromium Embedded Framework. Alternately, it might support embedding of both Gecko and Servo.

Also published on Medium.