Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 18th Aug 2010 21:03 UTC, submitted by suka
Mozilla & Gecko clones In a recent interview with derStandard.at Mozilla's Chris Blizzard talks about the rising competition by Google Chrome, the evolution of the web platform and the prospects for WebM. He also promises that Firefox 4 will be "one generation ahead" of other browsers in relation to Javascript speed.
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RE[2]: Comment by Panajev
by Panajev on Thu 19th Aug 2010 09:57 UTC in reply to "RE: Comment by Panajev"
Panajev
Member since:
2008-01-09

"It would be a lot of work, but a full Cocoa port of Firefox wold give Mozilla a lot more API's to play around than just OpenGL for compositing... Hopefully that gains traction in the future.

Firefox can already use the cpu and if it supports OpenGL it also can use the gpu. What would you gain if you support cocoa?
"

The same you do on Windows not writing it in plain C/C++ with no use of DirectX API's.

You get a whole bunch of GPU accelerated routines (with software fallbacks): you get Core Animation, you get Core Text, and you get an easier path towards 64 bit Firefox on Mac. You would also be able to use Apple's dev tools for a more productive debugging and extra performance (Clang for static analysis and compilation).
I'd also imagine it could have an easier time integrating into the OS X experience making use of they Keychain to store passwords and other sensitive data, it could use the system's spellchecker, it might open PDF's in the browser itself without external plugins, etc...

The problem with this approach is that you would have a hard time keeping the Windows and Linux C/C++ ports and the OS X Cocoa version at the same pace... not impossible, but it might be a burden for Mozilla and the OSS devs which might not like Objective-C that much.

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