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

[Vladimir Vukicevic]

On Feb 17, 2008, at 6:36 PM, ying lcs 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?

Plugins continue to use the native platform APIs, and we simply hand  
them a platform native surface (HDC, CGContext, whatever) to do so  
in.  This is really only an issue on the platforms that support  
'windowless plugins', where the plugin draws directly to the normal  
gfx content.  However, that list is all 3 platforms now, so it's an  
issue everywhere :)  As far as I know though, only Flash implements  
this mode.  There are a bunch of problems with it (e.g. difficulties  
in printing) that we have had to kludge in various workarounds for,  
but for the most part it seems to work ok.

      - Vlad