I don't think you can really do that - you simply need a native browser to be always available, even for stuff like captive portals on some WiFi hotspots. The Android emulation layer is (optionally) installed on first start, so you might need a native browser, so you can authenticate with with you hotspot to download Android support & install an Android browser.

Also in some cases Android emulation support is simply not available so an Android browser is out of the question:

• community ports
• Russian corporate devices reportedly don't have Android emulation by design
• cases where the user opted to no use the Android emulation layer

Also, even if the Android emulation layer is available, it is quickly approaching obsolescence on all the older devices & Xperia X due to only suportiong Android 4.4.x API level, so it's possible up to date Android browsers will no longer run on it.

Well, the current default Sailfish Browser already uses the Firefox rendering core (Gecko) and there is actually not many alternatives:

• WebKit is not in much of a good state, QtWebKit as well
• QtWebEngine is hard to build even on Fedora due to horrendous amount of bundling & outdated GCC
• Chromium - again horrendous amount of bundling, outdated GCC & not sure about Wayland support
• Firefox - only recently added support for running natively on Wayland (in Fedora 31 released a couple days ago), might be hard to build due to outdated GCC

So older Firefox core is actually maybe the only thing usable in current circumstances.


This is not correct - Jolla is not writing their own browser from scratch. The default Sailfish OS browser is just a thin layer that uses the Firefox 45 Gecko rendering core for all the actual website rendering.

AFAIK, the main issue why the browser if lagging behind is twofold:

1) Gecko does not really have a stable embedding interface, so for each Gecko upgrade, sizeable embedding patches need to be adjusted to all the code changes in the private APIs it has to use in the new Gecko version. This can be a significant endeavor.

I've talked to someone from the Mozilla community and apparently the new Firefox Preview on Android uses some new Gecko embedding API & can be used to provide a generic Gecko based web view to other Android applications. This could be a boon for Sailfish OS as well - if gecko needs to support embedding for Android, it could be possible to use the same API for embedding on Sailfish OS as well.

Also I seem to remember someone from Mozilla attending the Fosdem Sailfish OS meetup & discussing Gecko embedding improvements. So I guess things could improve in this case and hopefully make Gecko upgrades for the native Sailfish OS much less painful.

2) GCC & the overall library stack is currently too outdated to build modern versions of Gecko. IIRC glibc version has been bumped a bit recently, but we will likely be still stuck until GCC is finally upgraded as well.