[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

"On the Mac side of things, Goodger said Firefox 1.0 uses Apple's QuickDraw technology to draw to the screen, while the Windows version uses GDI. However, he said the next big move for the Mac version of Firefox would be away from QuickDraw.

QuickDraw, which Apple created in 1984, was the basis for 2D screen presentation in the Mac OS. With the advent of Mac OS X, Apple moved away from QuickDraw to its PDF-based Quartz rendering system, which is now incorporated in the Core Graphics architecture of Mac OS X.

"We were most focused on the feature set and user interface," Goodger said. "Maybe not for the next couple of months, but we plan to move Firefox" to the more modern rendering system. Firefox's reliance on QuickDraw, he said, is due to the fact that the low-level code of Firefox comes from Mozilla's Netscape 6 and 7 projects, which was largely coded in the years 1999 to 2001 for the Mac OS 9 operating system."

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1723617,00.asp

[turtle777]

Interesting, but why posted in the Lounge ?

-t

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

Originally posted by turtle777:
Interesting, but why posted in the Lounge ?

-t

Why not?

[turtle777]

Originally posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker:
Why not?

Because. There are other forums for that.
http://forums.macnn.com/forumdisplay...amp;forumid=82

Just imagine everybody just posts everything in the Lounge for the heck of it.

-t

[Agasthya]

That's funny. It uses legacy technology and still blows Safari out of the water.

[TheBadgerHunter]

Originally posted by Agasthya:
That's funny. It uses legacy technology and still blows Safari out of the water.

How so?

Not shocking it uses QD. What'd you expect?

[ambush]

Well.. QuickDraw has evolved since 1984.

But it still sucks

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

Originally posted by turtle777:
Because. There are other forums for that.
http://forums.macnn.com/forumdisplay...amp;forumid=82

Just imagine everybody just posts everything in the Lounge for the heck of it.

-t

Tell that to the 100 other firefox threads in the lounge that don't bother you.

You're not going to have a sleepless night are you?

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

Originally posted by TheBadgerHunter:

Not shocking it uses QD. What'd you expect?

PDF drawing that has been built into OSX for 4 years.

[MindFad]

I'm guessing this is why scrolling sucks Firefox? Otherwise, I like Firefox.

[TheBadgerHunter]

Originally posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker:
PDF drawing that has been built into OSX for 4 years.

Which is why new browsers use it. FireFox is based off Mozilla which predates OS X by some time. No real shock that they haven't switched yet.

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

Originally posted by TheBadgerHunter:
Which is why new browsers use it. FireFox is based off Mozilla which predates OS X by some time. No real shock that they haven't switched yet.

Well if they are going to do it in the next couple months I don't see why they didn't do it over 3 years ago.

[Eug Wanker]

Originally posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker:
Well if they are going to do it in the next couple months I don't see why they didn't do it over 3 years ago.

Cuz it's easier to reuse code instead of rewriting it. Plus it seems to work pretty well.

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

Originally posted by Eug Wanker:
Cuz it's easier to reuse code instead of rewriting it. Plus it seems tork pretty well.

No I am saying if this is something they admitting fault about and plan to hit it in 2 months why didn't they do it a while ago and have the 1.0 come out with a bang.

[Eug Wanker]

Originally posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker:
No I am saying if this is something they admitting fault about and plan to hit it in 2 months why didn't they do it a while ago and have the 1.0 come out with a bang.

I guess cuz they didn't want to wait another several months before a 1.0 version is out. I suspect time-to-market was a big consideration.

Anyways, I have no complaints. Firefox is my fave browser on the XP, and it's tied with Safari for my fave browser on OS X.

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

Originally posted by Eug Wanker:
I guess cuz they didn't want to wait another several months before a 1.0 version is out. I suspect time-to-market was a big consideration.

Anyways, I have no complaints. Firefox is my fave browser on the XP, and it's tied with Safari for my fave browser on OS X.

Firefox on XP is astoundingly faster in IE on XP. At least in Virtual PC.

On a Mac it doesn't feel that much better then safari and Java apps still got problems in it.

[turtle777]

Originally posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker:
Tell that to the 100 other firefox threads in the lounge that don't bother you.
You're not going to have a sleepless night are you?

If you get it, most of it will be taken care of

-t

[TETENAL]

They didn't switch to Quartz because up until recently QuickDraw text was significantly faster than ATSUI (and easier to use and the code was already there). ATSUI performance has increased in Panther and I assume more so in Tiger where I guess it can be hardware accelerated. Also, QuickDraw is now officially deprecated so they are sort of forced to do the switch.

[Busemann]

Originally posted by Agasthya:
That's funny. It uses legacy technology and still blows Safari out of the water.

"Blows Safari out of the water" is one of those exaggerations

[tooki]

Originally posted by ambush:
Well.. QuickDraw has evolved since 1984.

But it still sucks

Nonsense.

QuickDraw was brilliant code, some of the first able to do that type of drawing with high performance. Without QuickDraw, the Mac would not have been possible, because drawing arbitrary text and graphics onto the screen would have been too slow.

The only problem with QuickDraw is that it doesn't do all the things we want a modern graphics subsystem to do. QuickDraw GX addressed all those issues: QuickDraw GX was pretty much comparable to Quartz 2D in its abilities. Using PDF just has a lot of compatibility benefits nowadays, since PDFs are everywhere.

By the way, saying that Firefox is based on "QuickDraw from 1984" makes no sense: none of the QuickDraw code lives in the application -- it's not a C library or anything like that that gets integrated into the application. QuickDraw lives in the operating system code. An application makes calls (commands) to QuickDraw when it wants to draw things. Firefox is based on code that was written for Mac OS 8 and 9, which used QuickDraw that was decidedly more advanced than the original 1982-1986 version.

tooki

[Millennium]

Originally posted by tooki:
The only problem with QuickDraw is that it doesn't do all the things we want a modern graphics subsystem to do. QuickDraw GX addressed all those issues: QuickDraw GX was pretty much comparable to Quartz 2D in its abilities. Using PDF just has a lot of compatibility benefits nowadays, since PDFs are everywhere.

QuickDraw GX was badass in the extreme for its time, and it could hold its own respectably even against modern 2D drawing APIs. Unfortunately, it suffered from the same thing that most of Apple's best technology has suffered over the years: lack of documentation and poor adoption by the OS itself.

By the way, saying that Firefox is based on "QuickDraw from 1984" makes no sense: none of the QuickDraw code lives in the application -- it's not a C library or anything like that that gets integrated into the application. QuickDraw lives in the operating system code. An application makes calls (commands) to QuickDraw when it wants to draw things. Firefox is based on code that was written for Mac OS 8 and 9, which used QuickDraw that was decidedly more advanced than the original 1982-1986 version.

The original Mozilla builds were supposed to run all the way back to OS8.1 (I forget why OS8.0 wasn't slated to be supported, but there was a reason for it). Mozilla uses QuickDraw now because it used it then.

As for Star Wars Guy's question:

Well if they are going to do it in the next couple months I don't see why they didn't do it over 3 years ago.

For one thing, Mozilla was still slated to be compatible with OS9 as recently as two years ago, so that knocks your "over 3 years ago" figure down a fair amount. Quartz code cannot be made to run on OS9, so they had to keep QuickDraw then, to make sure it stayed compatible.

After they finally ditched OS9, they wanted to convert Mozilla to use the Mach-O format rather than the older CFM app format, because they saw performance benefits to doing so. This turned out to be more difficult than they had expected, and it took them another six months. Quartz code cannot be called directly from CFM; it can be called from a CFM app, but it takes some impressive code acrobatics, and there were higher priorities at the time.

That gets us down to 18 months ago. At this point, the Mozilla Organization's priority was shifting towards preparing Firefox for a 1.0 release. This meant, once again, higher priorities. Now that Firefox is at a stable 1.0 code base, they have time to start poring back over the backend code, to move away from QuickDraw.

Actually, though, from the way things are shaping up, the move won't be to Quartz. As I understand it, Mozilla is looking at moving to Cairo for its new drawing backend. This is a vector-based library with many similarities to Quartz, but it is more cross-platform. My guess is that they will use the OpenGL-based backend for this, again to improve the cross-platform aspect.

[ink]

Originally posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker:
No I am saying if this is something they admitting fault about and plan to hit it in 2 months why didn't they do it a while ago and have the 1.0 come out with a bang.

What's the big deal?

Camino uses Quartz, and it's much slower than Firefox. Additionally, Firefox's text input box is 100% responsive while posting to MacNN. Safari is almost painful to type in when all the animated smilies are showing (500Mhz G3/Panther); it reminds me of the days of 1200 baud modems. I'm pretty impressed with Firefox.

[hayesk]

Originally posted by Millennium:
The original Mozilla builds were supposed to run all the way back to OS8.1 (I forget why OS8.0 wasn't slated to be supported, but there was a reason for it). Mozilla uses QuickDraw now because it used it then.

Agreed, but his point was that Mozilla or any Mac app doesn't contain QuickDraw code at all. The operating system does. So, Mozilla uses whichever version of QD is in the OS you are running.

[TETENAL]

Originally posted by ink:
Camino uses Quartz, and it's much slower than Firefox.

Camino uses QuickDraw just like any other Mozilla.

[wataru]

Originally posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker:
On a Mac it doesn't feel that much better then safari and Java apps still got problems in it.

I already posted, in response to one of your posts in another Firefox thread, a link to a Java plugin that lets browsers other than Safari access the latest version of Java. Did you even bother using that?

[ink]

Originally posted by TETENAL:
Camino uses QuickDraw just like any other Mozilla.

Mea culpa; it seems that it uses Cocoa with QD.

[Eug Wanker]

[Millennium]

Originally posted by Eug Wanker:

Your point?

In the early days of OSX, it was common to use QuickDraw even in Cocoa apps, because it was much faster. This was back before Quartz Extreme and such, so only QuickDraw (and QuickTime, which continues to use it) had any kind of video acceleration at all. They still had to deal with the Quartz compositing bottleneck, but the result was still faster than what could typically be achieved with Quartz alone.

QuickDraw did continue to receive some enhancements in earlier releases of OSX. In particular, 10.1 gave QuickDraw the ability to use ATSUI for smooth font rendering, and later on it got the full range of Quartz text renderers. Mozilla uses one of these renderers today; they experimented with ATSUI as well, but this provided such a terrible speed hit when they did it that they switched back.

I admit to knowing of no enhancements for Tiger, however (small wonder, given that QD has been deprecated for years), but this doesn't yet make it non-viable. Come to think of it, what advantage would Quartz give to Mozilla, anyway?

[Eug Wanker]

No real point, except to say that Apple seems to be really trying to EOL QD now. After listening to their presentation, it almost sounds like... "Yeah, your QD code will work for now, but no guarantees for a couple of years from now, because QD is dead."

I'm not a coder, so I don't understand the specifics, but it really sounded like were doing the OS 9 coffin thing to QD.

[Busemann]

Originally posted by Millennium:
(and QuickTime, which continues to use it)

QT will move over to Quartz in Tiger.

In the the WWDC Graphics and Media State of the Union they are strongly encouraging developers to move away from QD in their apps. The speed advantage QD has had until now will be vanquished by Quartz in Tiger, which means Safari probably could be faster than Firefox if they continue to rely on QD

[TETENAL]

Originally posted by Millennium:
I admit to knowing of no enhancements for Tiger, however (small wonder, given that QD has been deprecated for years), but this doesn't yet make it non-viable.

QuickDraw hasn't been deprecated for years. It's deprecated since this years WWDC.

Come to think of it, what advantage would Quartz give to Mozilla, anyway?

Speed, better Unicode support with ATSUI, better looking non latin text, better looking rounded boxes, better support for ColorSync, and other stuff that shall not be mentioned by contractual binding.