Mozilla disallows others from using the Firefox trademark for custom compiled versions, which is understandable and agreeable. What I don't get is how they're then willing to put their name on something where they are forced to use webkit. Fear of losing market share? Hope that Apple will allow them to use Gecko or Servo in the future?
There's a lot more to being a browser -- and being Firefox -- than the web rendering engine. We're able to deliver the kinds of Sync features, private browsing, and so on that we think are important.
(I work on Firefox for Android and iOS, and even _I_ don't really care which rendering engine it uses. I care that I can trust it, that the UX is excellent, and that I have my data.)
That is a good point. To me, however, an important part of the appeal of Firefox has always been a belief that having multiple competing rendering engines is fundamentaly good for the open web -- that it keeps the HTML and CSS standards from growing in too much of an implementation specific direction. I had thought, perhaps without grounds, that this view was shared by Mozilla.
This view is shared by many people at Mozilla (but not all, I expect; it's hard to find anything 1000+ people will agree on) and I believe shared by Mozilla overall. I mean, we're not just continuing to develop the rendering engine we already have (Gecko), we're creating another one as well (Servo)...
It's actually a pretty consistent view. You can use Gecko through a reskinned FF clone like Palemoon or Iceweasel, but can't call it Firefox. Firefox is the UI chrome and corresponding stack. Gecko is the engine.
Some would say they're part and parcel, but it's clear now that Mozilla doesn't agree.
It's entirely inconsistent with Mozilla's past actions.
You can compile Firefox source code of which 100% of it came from released Firefox versions in Mozilla's HG tree and they won't let you call that "Firefox". Part of why IceWeasel exists is Debian wanted to backport security patches from Firefox releases into an older version (eg. apply security patches from Firefox 4 to Firefox 3.5) for Debian-stable and Mozilla wouldn't let them use the name Firefox if they did that.
Therefore your claim that
> Firefox is the UI chrome and corresponding stack
doesn't match the reality of what Mozilla has done. It seems now Firefox is anything that Mozilla calls Firefox.
What Mozilla won't let you call "Firefox": a version of Firefox where the only changes are security patches backported from a future version of Firefox (see: the Debian and IceWeasel debacle).
What Mozilla will call "Firefox": a wrapper around WkWebView that uses WebKit.
