Azure Replacing Cairo In Mozilla Firefox

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Azure Replacing Cairo In Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox -- particularly the Gecko rendering engine -- has long been a user of the Cairo graphics rendering library. Cairo is also used by GTK+, Mono, WebKit, and many other open-source projects for a vector-based, device-independent 2D drawing API. Cairo now has back-ends for OpenGL, Win32 GDI, Mac OS X Quartz, Direct2D, and many other APIs, but Mozilla developers are doing away with this library. To replace Cairo, Mozilla developers created "Azure" as a new 2D multi-platform graphics library...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTcxNQ

[birdie]

The back-ends for the Azure library are Direct2D, Quartz, OpenGL, Direct3D, and Cairo.

OMFG!

Where's X11?

What if I don't have a working OpenGL stack on my Linux? Does that mean in this case Firefox will render its interface via XUL->Gecko->Azure->Cairo->X11?

F*ck you very much.

[deanjo]

OMFG!

Where's X11?

What if I don't have a working OpenGL stack on my Linux? Does that mean in this case Firefox will render its interface via XUL->Gecko->Azure->Cairo->X11?

F*ck you very much.

I hear that a ncurses rendering library is in the works as well.

[drag]

OMFG!

Where's X11?

Why would they care about X11 when they have OpenGL?

What if I don't have a working OpenGL stack on my Linux?

Then you have a problem. I don't know why it should be Mozilla's problem, too. Fix your shit.

[birdie]

drag, you ARE ridiculous.

I have yet to find any good stable working OpenGL driver for any GPU in Linux.

Will you tell me which one truly WORKS? Which one is bug free, supports all features, doesn't crash occasionally, is fast enough, etc?

[patstew]

Talk to these people: http://www.nvidia.com
The nvidia blob is as stable as vesafb in my recent experience. Open source is great, but for graphics drivers it really doesn't matter.

[pingufunkybeat]

I have this feeling that they have been focusing primarily on Windows for quite a long time now.

[RealNC]

Ha ha, I guess it's "good news, everyone!"

[cl333r]

# Matt on 2011-06-23 at 01:32
Are there any plans to create an XRender backend for Linux, or will those users be stuck with Cairo until you come up with a general OpenGL version?
Also, is the plan to move everything to the GL/D3D versions eventually, or would you first try D2D/Quartz and only fall back to the 3D APIs if those weren't found?


# Bas [Member] Email on 2011-06-23 at 03:21
@Matt: There was discussion, but the small market and the large difference in quality between different X-render implementations make the return on investment too low to justify. So I'm afraid they'll be stuck with cairo until we come up with our own accelerated backend.

The second part of your question depends largely on how good our versions will turn out to be. If at some point they perform better than D2D, logically we'll start using them, as long as they don't, we probably won't . Consistency is important but so is a great user experience!

I think it says what we all knew already.
Hopefully they at least enable the nvidia blobs by default since they're good enough.

[elanthis]

OMFG!

Where's X11?

It's supported via the Cairo backend.