First Hands on Firefox 3 (OS X Improvements)
17 June 2008, Hedi |
Second level of analysis I’m going to do is OS X based ones. As we already said before, Firefox is going to move from the Carbon API, to the modern and classy Cocoa.
As a result, Firefox gets that native Aqua style forms we’re used to like the search button in Google.

Firefox also uses Core Graphics (which uses the Quartz technology) now instead of the Quick Draw technology (available on Macs since 1984)… The consequence is hardware acceleration provided by Core Graphics that leads to increase performances!
Now Mozilla’s projects for OS X are simple: replacing more and more Carbon by Cocoa to finally reach 64 bits versions of Firefox.
Aside from the usual bug squashing, we’re going to focus on minimizing Carbon usage and getting ready for 64-bit. Gecko 1.9.0 is generally Cocoa-based but it still contains a modest amount of Carbon and other code that is not 64-bit-ready. We’re probably not going to be Carbon-free or 64-bit-ready for the Gecko 1.9.1 release, but we can make a lot of progress. (Josh Aas)
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