Well, I'm Back

I've been reading some dissastisfaction with the state of Firefox and Gecko on Linux. I feel I should comment because for a couple of years I was Novell's "Firefox guy" and did significant work on Gecko/GNOME integration.

I take exception to comments like:

However it geniunely seems that Mozilla does not care about Linux the slightest.

The truth is that during every development cycle we sink a ton of effort into making sure that Gecko and all its features work well on Linux. In 1.9 we've done lots of work to integrate with Pango, fix cairo-on-X issues, make sure <video> works, wrangle build-system and compiler issues, etc. If we didn't care about Linux, we'd just drop support for it. That would help us get Mac and Windows releases out faster, and after all they're where most users are. Fortunately we don't make decisions purely for economic reasons. I'd like to see people recognise that.

Part of the problem is that people are using Gecko 1.8.1 which is over two years old now. We'll ship Gecko 1.9 soon which has a ton of good stuff for Linux users:

• Michael Ventnor (awesome volunteer contributor) has fixed a bunch of GTK theme bugs and turned on GTK themes for HTML form widgets --- very sexy. (MoCo is hiring him as an intern to carry on working on these and other issues during the summer.)
• Teune van Steege (another contributor) has implemented GTK theme support for tree headers, which fixes the most important remaining non-native-looking UI element.
• We've ripped out our own cross-platform drawing code and are now using cairo for everything. Along the way we've made a lot of contributions to cairo. We're trying really hard to be good community players here.
• We integrate nicely with Pango now, using it to shape all complex scripts and also Latin text in many situations. By tweaking one pref you can disable the non-Pango fast path and get Pango for all text.
• Thanks to Theppitak Karoonboonyanan and other contributors we use Pango line-breaking for scripts that have extraordinary line-breaking needs such as Thai, Lao, and Tibetan.
• Karl Tomlinson (MoCo) designed and implemented "windowless plugin" support for X so that Linux can have platform parity with Mac and Windows users when Adobe supports it in their Linux Flash player (or if swfdec beats them to it!).
• We've landed in 1.9 some of the GNOME integration work that I did for Novell, in particular startup notification support and dbus-based NetworkManager integration. (Some of the other work I did, like improved GConf integration has still to land ... just needs someone to push it in.)

There's definitely more we could do. I've been soliciting volunteers to implement RGBA translucent windows for X, for example, and it would be nice to support the GNOME print dialog. But I think we've made good progress.

One observation is that the number of Mozilla developers who are Linux users has dropped quite a bit as many of us (including me) have switched to Macs. I think this is partly due to Apple's hardware and software being very good and partly due to the fact that because Apple is evil, you can virtualize Linux on Mac but not the other way around. No doubt this has impacted Linux support a little bit. I still think that Linux is ultimately very important to Mozilla because proprietary client platforms will always pose a threat to the open Internet; the client vendors will constantly be trying to find ways to extend their control into the network. (And of course an open Internet is crucial to the survival of open clients, which is one of the main reasons I do what I do.)

Let me just address a few other complaints while I'm here:

• The list of things Firefox could do to improve integration with the underlying environment goes on and on

  I'd like to see that list. Now that we have more heads, we might get some of those things done within MoCo, and I'd be more than happy to help other contributors get them done.
• We have done a lot of work on memory consumption, some with help from Federico Mena-Quintero. We know this is a big deal. We're getting better in this and other areas and we're going to keep getting better.
• Webkit is a good engine and getting it running in GNOME is a good thing, but be careful about comparing a two-year-old engine you use all the time (and hence see all the bugs of) with something that isn't quite there yet. Also, I would hate to see Apple with too much power over the free desktop ... keep options open.

• WebKit ... happily uses GTK the way it was meant to be used instead of doing crappy hacks like cloning several instances of one widget and overloading its painting context.

  I'm not sure if this person knows what they're talking about, but if the Webkit/GTK port is using real GTK widgets in Web pages, then either they're doing some wizardry that I don't understand or they're going to have serious problems rendering content like this: Hello (this demo might be mangled by feed readers etc). Even Webkit on Mac and IE on Windows don't use real native widgets. I agree our theming approach on GTK is a crappy hack; I've been begging for years for a real GTK theme-drawing API we could use, like Mac and Windows provide.