Firefox to Gain More Mac OS X Features

Daniel Drew Turner, reporting for eWeek:

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.

★ Saturday, 13 November 2004