After some consideration, I’ve decided to discontinue development of Positron.

Positron was an experimental runtime for creating desktop apps using web technologies. It was based on Firefox, and its principal feature was that it was Electron-compatible. I started working on it—in conjunction with several colleagues—to enable Tofino to run on Gecko.

But Tofino is dead (long live the Browser Futures Group!), and Electron compatibility isn’t essential for a viable Gecko runtime. It’s also hard, since Electron has a large API surface area, is a moving target, requires Node.js integration (itself a moving target), and is designed for Chromium’s process architecture, which is substantially different from Firefox’s.

I’ve previously written about the utility of desktop runtimes (among other embedding projects). I still think they’re valuable for a variety of use cases, and Gecko can provide unique value to desktop application development. I’ll continue to pursue the realization of that value. I just won’t do it through Positron.

Also published on Medium.