Tech —

Cocoa widgets in Firefox, Thunderbird progressing nicely.

The holy grail of web browsing, Firefox with native widgets, is inching closer …

 For most Mac users out there who make a living on the Web, using Safari exclusively just isn't an option.  Camino is nice and all (it's my daily browser, in fact), but Firefox is unparalleled in its plugins and installed userbase / community.  One common complaint Mac users have about Firefox is that it just doesn't feel like a native OS X application.  This is a valid critisism, mostly because... Firefox isn't a native application.  Firefox abstracts away a lot of the OS-specific stuff like dialogs, context menus, and "widgets" like buttons and dropdowns in order to be more portable across platforms.

A ongoing project on the Firefox team is to bring OS X's native widgets (ala Camino) into the Firefox fold, and assauge a lot of the common complaints heard from Mac users. Josh Aas has been the point-man when it comes to implementing Cocoa widgets in Firefox and recently wrote a bit about his progress:

Cocoa Firefox builds are somewhat useable (for messing around, not daily use). They have some crashes lurking, modals and sheet dialogs are messy and not completely functional, and context menus don't work at all. Other than that the builds aren't bad.

I think I can finish off most of the crashers and the sheet/modal
stuff in the next two weeks. Hopefully by that point Darin will at
least be close to landing his event/thread stuff,
and hopefully within a week or so after that we can get context menus
working. At that point we should be ready to turn Cocoa widgets on for
all products on the trunk.

You'll notice Josh mentioned a bit about moving over to native threads/timers which will presumably allow fixes for a whole host of buglets (check out the "Bug 326273 blocks" section).  Presumably fixes for Firefox's event handling are also in the works, which will pave the way for bug fixes like the much publicized "hold and click to get 100% cpu usage" bug.  Josh also goes on to mention the new Quartz-based rendering backend for Mozilla's Cairo. All in all it looks like days of using more Mac-friendly Firefox are not too far off. 

Channel Ars Technica