[Camino] Fizzilla, CHBrowserView, Cocoazilla, Camino.....

[Mike Pinkerton]

Let me give a little background, that might help.

In the beginning, there was Mozilla. The widget and graphics layers 
were written with Quickdraw using all of the old Mac OS API calls. The 
app ran on OS8 and OS9.

Then Apple released Mac OS X and they wanted a whole bunch of apps to 
run on it with limited tweaking. They munged all the old APIs into a 
reduced set called "Carbon". These are mostly legacy APIs, C-based. 
Many of them have existed since 1984. Also "introduced" with OS X was a 
totally separate UI toolkit called "Cocoa" based on the NeXTStep 
objective-C toolkit, cleaned up and repurposed for OS X, called 
"Cocoa". These toolkits live independently for the most part.

In order to run on OS X, we had to "Carbonize" Mac Mozilla. This 
effort, which I led, was called "Fizzilla" (cuz it's carbonated, get 
it? didn't think so) and resulted in a CFM-based version of Mozilla 
that ran on both OS9 and OSX, though we only really ever certified it 
for OSX. Fizzilla used all the Carbon APIs which were the same 
Quickdraw, etc APIs that have been around on the Mac forever. The 
original Fizzilla was still built with CodeWarrior.

After the Fizzilla port was complete, we realized that we wanted to 
ditch all the file, threading, and networking code using the old 
antiquated MacOS apis and use the much more performant and easier to 
understand UNIX apis. In order to do this, our app had to use the 
mach-o binary format, which also had other speed benefits. To separate 
the two projects (CFM v Mach) we reused the names slightly: Fizzilla 
became "FizzillaCFM" and we introduced "FizzillaMach".

FizzillaMach only ran on OSX and was built using gcc and the same 
make-based system the other UNIXes used, which was a HUGE benefit for 
the dev community. It also moved from pay tools (CodeWarrior) to free 
tools (gcc) which got another big cheer from the open source community. 
FizzillaCFM was eventually retired completely, I think the last version 
of Mozilla that was CFM was Moz1.4.

After we completed that transition, I and a few others started to get 
interested in Cocoa development. We already had a Carbon-based 
embedding layer (written by Conrad Carlen) using Metrowerk's 
Powerplant. Several companies used it to embed mozilla in their CFM 
apps. For mach-o, though, we had no embedding solution and if mach-o 
was our future, we needed to make something happen. We could try to use 
PP in a mach-o world or we could try to use Cocoa which apple was 
pushing very heavily over Carbon as the future api for MacOS.

As I recounted in my ArsTechnica interview, Vidur and I created an 
embedding layer that wrapped mozilla in Cocoa, allowing its use from 
any Cocoa app. We also rewrote certain parts of widget with Cocoa 
instead of Carbon. Thus, "Cocoazilla" was born. CHBrowserView, formerly 
NSBrowserView, was the embedding-layer API most visible to embedding 
apps, so the two became synonymous in their usage. CHBrowserView, 
however, isn't a project name, it's a NSView subclass only. The goal of 
Cocoazilla was to write as much of widget and gfx with cocoa 
implementations and then eventually move all of Mozilla over to those. 
Obviously that is still in progress ;)

Camino (then Chimera) picked up on Cocoazilla and took it to a new 
level. We were a Cocoa front end and embedded Gecko through 
CHBrowserView. Why are there two CHBrowserView's? Blame hyatt. He was 
too lazy to use the embedding layer correctly and forked it. We've 
never gone back. The CHBrowserView in the mozilla tree has probably 
bit-rotted and may or may not be usable. Camino has its own version 
that is conceptually similar but is kept up to date with a tinderbox to 
monitor Gecko API changes.

Anything I leave out?
-Pink