On the nature of Mozilla's toolkit [LWN.net]

On the nature of Mozilla's toolkit

Posted Jun 2, 2005 12:45 UTC (Thu) by markhb (guest, #1003)
In reply to: On the nature of bloat by eru
Parent article: What the Linux Desktop Needs (OS Views)

If you look back at the start of the open-source Mozilla project, they didn't start with their own toolkit; they started with the original Navigator architecture of a common backend and various platform-specific front ends: one for Win32, one for Mac, one for Unix, each using it's native widget set (the original Unix versions used Motif, which meant that you had to have a Motif license to build the app in the early days). This had two problems:

The obvious Motif-related difficulty, and the fact that Lesstif was rudimentary at the time, and
The fact that most open-source developers were on Linux, while the most important platform from a user-acceptance perspective was (and is) Win32, which required Visual C++ to build.

Those, coupled with the fact that pulling out everything NSCP couldn't release had left the codebase unbuildable, led to a realization: since the difference in implementation between various platforms meant they essentially had to build widgets for HTML form controls, why couldn't they use those same widgets for the entire UI, cross-platform. That was the origin of Xptoolkit, and it was the coupling of that with the nglayout component (which became Gecko) that was the genesis of the original Mozilla 1.0 / Netscape 6.