Short answer: the Gecko codebase wasn't very good back then and it certainly wasn't designed to be embedded elsewhere.
Think about it—Nokia, Google, Blackberry, Samsung could have picked Gecko back in the day but they all chose WebKit instead. That should tell you something.
Google forked WebKit to make Blink in 2013 and since then, Opera, Vivaldi and now Microsoft are using Blink. Not even the creator of Firefox and former head of Mozilla Brendan Eich, ended up using Firefox--Brave also is using Chromium/Blink.
Technically Brendan Eich was part of the creation of "Firefox" in 1998-2002, because the browser was previously known as Netscape (closed source) and Mozilla (open source).
Brendan Eich was a co-founder of Mozilla (although not of Netscape).
Your correspondent said that I was part of "the creation of Firefox" and that's true. Twisting his words to advance a straw man you knock down does nothing to erase my role in the creation of Firefox.
You're implicitly reading my comment as some sort attempt to diminish your involvement, and explicitly claiming that I'm the one twisting words. You're wrong about both.
"Part of the creation of Firefox" is the second iteration of the wording in play here, which means it's you and jannes who are twisting words here. I know that moving the goalposts is one of HN's favorite pastimes, but it's a stupid one.
The point where I joined this conversation was to correct someone who referred to you as "the creator of Firefox". I was right to do so. (More than that, it's something you should have been glad to see...) If you want to see this as an insult despite it not being one and then move in to attack me over it with ironic accusations of strawmanning, you can go piss up a flagpole.
We agree I’m not “the” or even “a” creator of Firefox, but the iteration I saw was from “part of” to implied “none”. That is the impression left in Mozilla and other wiki sources unless you check web.archive.org, and it is a bigger wtf for me than my misreading of your intent here. I hope so, anyway! There is an effort to erase me, by others (not you), which is not only dishonest — it won’t work. Sorry for misreading you.
Think about it—Nokia, Google, Blackberry, Samsung could have picked Gecko back in the day but they all chose WebKit instead. That should tell you something.
Google forked WebKit to make Blink in 2013 and since then, Opera, Vivaldi and now Microsoft are using Blink. Not even the creator of Firefox and former head of Mozilla Brendan Eich, ended up using Firefox--Brave also is using Chromium/Blink.