[cairo] Question about how Firefox 3 switching to use cairo as the graphics engine

[Gerdus van Zyl]

Gecko/Firefox uses cairo to replace their own custom drawing routines
that implements the drawing part of the gecko API. Firefox extensions
use the gecko API (or XML/JS/SVG/etc), so the switch to cairo is
transparent.

Plugins eg: flash, java use a platform window handle or platform
surface directly that they get through the plugin API that is called
NPAPI. So in that case those plugins do not use cairo at all. see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPAPI and
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Plugins

My understanding comes from reading the mozilla code and blog entries,
so I may be somewhat wrong :-)

~Gerdus

On Feb 18, 2008 4:36 AM, ying lcs <yinglcs at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I know this may be a wrong question for this question. But I get no
> response when i posted this to mozilla newsgroup.
>
> I think  Firefox 3 switching to use cairo as the graphics engine.
> I think it can use cairo paint text, draw line functions to display
> web page content.
> But what about plugins? How will plugins being drawn to the cairo surface?
>
> Thank you.
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