537077 - Widget: Swing

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Widget, enhancement)

Description

[wbrana]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2b6pre) Gecko/20091229 Firefox/3.6b6pre
Build Identifier: 

Firefox could use also Swing for GUI, which could increase platform portability
and add hardware acceleration

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/2d/new_features.html

J2SE 5.0 includes a new OpenGL-based pipeline for Java 2D. This pipeline provides hardware acceleration for simple rendering operations (text, images, lines, and filled primitives) as well as those that involve complex transforms, paints, composites, and clips. This pipeline is available on all platforms (Solaris, Linux, and Microsoft Windows) and is currently disabled by default. 

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

Firefox is not written in Java. And this version is not for for all platforms that Firefox runs on (including Mac). Do you really want a total redesign after all those years ?

Comment 2

[wbrana]

Firefox would be hybrid C++/Java application. C++ can call Java and Java can call C++ using Java Native Interface.
Firefox already has a lot of platform-specific code. Mac version don't have to use Swing.

Main advantage of Swing would be hardware acceleration of 2D graphics using OpenGL, which J2SE supports since 2004, but Firefox still doesn't.
I guess J2SE is already open source.

Comment 3

[Jo Hermans]

You´re 10 years late, really. Back then, Java wasn´t Open Source, which was one of the factors why Java wasn´t chosen as part of the platform (there are more). For graphics, Mozilla is currently using Cairo, which should provide OpenGL acceleration (on some platforms it already does, see bug 521266).