Cairo Mozilla’s "Answer" to Flash?

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Cairo In reading this blog post (which I highly enjoyed) I came across an interview with Mitchell Baker, the CEO of Mozilla, about Cairo, a graphics engine that may be incorporated into the Mozilla platform for doing vector graphics. The interview is pretty quick and touches on how Mozilla is planning to support Flash-like functionality.

But in doing some research on Cairo, it seems to be a separate project that has been around for a while. According to the cairographics.org site, Cairo is:

Cairo is a 2D graphics library with support for multiple output devices. Currently supported output targets include the X Window System, Win32, image buffers, PostScript, PDF, and SVG file output. Experimental backends include OpenGL (through glitz), Quartz, and XCB.

It supports a lot of formats, which is awesome, and the OpenGL support seems to imply some hardware acceleration. There is a page for Cairo off of the Mozilla Wiki which is proposed for deletion. The wikipedia page for Cairo is pretty informative and seems to imply that Cairo will render the UI for Firefox 3 which I think would mean that anyone building on top of the Mozilla platform could take advantage of the features in Cairo to create custom chrome ala Apollo.

I realize I’m a little out of my element here and the fact that Cairo seems like a long established project makes me wonder why I haven’t heard of it before. Am I losing my touch (if I ever had any)? Has anyone done anything with Cairo? It seems like it has a lot of promise.

[tags]Mozilla, Cairo[/tags]

Related posts:

  1. Flash and SVG
  2. Offline Cache Support Added to the Firefox Code
  3. Apollo Makes Firefox 3′s Offline Feature Irrelevant
  4. Candid Talk about XULRunner
  • http://blogs.katapultmedia.com/jb2 John C. Bland II

    Burning the oil tonight, huh? :-) Me too.

    Anyways, Cairo has been talked about a bit over the last couple months. From what I gathered, Cairo is akin to Apollo but still a full-fledge browser (Firefox). It will basically allow us (web developers) to take advantage of desktop functionality with native web technologies.

    The main thing, if my memory serves correct, was offline storage of data for dynamic sites. Nothing I would have to do to my code but Cairo would handle it automagically for me.

    Yes, very interesting. I’d like to see more on it though.

    BTW, keep up the good open-minded work on RIA’s. It def’ is good to be a geek now-a-days. ;-)

  • Jeremy

    Mozilla is actually using Cairo as their new graphic composition engine. Cairo is going to allow them to have smoother font rendering, better image scaling (and page scaling), improved svg support and the ability to support more of the CSS3 specs, e.g., shadows on text, block elements, etc….

    In addition to Cairo, Mozilla has been working on offline storage for RIAs. So when you combine everything its like Apollo, but Apollo is kind of like a browser with extra features.

  • http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com Ryan Stewart

    Cool, so it sounds like it’s less about the user interface and more about the actual rendering engine. Thanks guys! John, get some sleep :)

  • http://rickosborne.org/ Rick O

    The way I understood it, Cairo was just the graphics package that did all of the heavy lifting. AFAIK, it’s not really intended for direct userspace or even developerspace interaction, it’s just supposed to make everything graphical in Firefox work faster and easier. The FF crew started looking into it with the birth of the <canvas> tag, so that they wouldn’t have to write all of the graphic primitive handling operations. IIRC, in doing the integration they found out that it was well-suited as a general purpose rendering layer, and it sort of expanded outwards from there.

  • http://blogs.katapultmedia.com/jb2 John C. Bland II

    lol. Sleep was good. :-)

    I know what I was thinking about…Firefox 3. That’s where I’ve been hearing all that buzz (must have mixed it up somehow).

  • http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd John Dowdell

    Cairo: Cross-environment graphics library. Used in many of the SVG runtimes the past few years.s

    Firefox: Document browser which can visit any site in the world.

    Apollo: Cross-environment application runtime, bringing specific HTML/SWF webpages out of the browser and onto the desktop as applications.

    (Mitchell’s phrasing in that article was interesting, if you read between the lines, but her Sunday night post on standalone XULRunner may have been more decisive.)

    jd/adobe

  • http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com Ryan Stewart

    Which one was her Sunday night post? I think I have it starred in Google Reader, but I’ll have to go back and check.

  • http://blogs.katapultmedia.com/jb2 John C. Bland II

    jd, the likeness I mean is the offline application aspect…not really the blood that runs through’em. (just to clarify)

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