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Porting a Carbon toolkit to Cocoa: the example of Firefox

This item by the developers of the Firefox browser caught my eye: it's an interesting take on how they are porting Firefox's Gecko rendering engine (the part that parses HTML and displays it to the screen--in short, the foundation) to use Cocoa instead of Carbon. (By way of comparison, Apple's Safari uses WebKit, a different open-source HTML engine.)

Unlike the Cocoa port of Qt, this does seem to result in some user-visible changes. Firefox 3.0 (now in final "release candidate" stage) is much more pleasant to use than Firefox 2.x, in large part because it gets the UI right. Here's an example from Firefox 2.0:

Kinda ugly, especially the button and search field...

Here's an example of Firefox 3.0:

Pretty nice.

It's not entirely surprising to me that the Mozilla developers have taken a different approach with their Cocoa port than the Trolltech/Qt developers. In the case of Trolltech, I understand the goal to be a drop-in replacement of the Carbon foundation with the Cocoa foundation. The changes are supposed to be invisible to Trolltech's customers, which are Mac developers: they are supposed to cause as little disruption as possible. By contrast, Mozilla's update of Gecko coincides with a major update of an application, Firefox: changes are expected and even desired. Many users complained about what they see as Firefox's poor integration with OS X. Firefox 3.0 should address that in a big way.

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