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ghoti
owner for sale by house
 
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Charlotte, NC
 
2005-05-21, 14:12

Firefox suffers from the same problem as OpenOffice and quite a few other programs: applications that are designed to be platform-independent are written using a platform-abstraction layer. This layer is then adapted to all the platforms the program is ported to. While it's possible in theory to design this layer such that it will work seamlessly with all OSs, this is really difficult in practice. There are many small dependencies and assumptions that often make it much easier to implement a new toolbar/window/whatever that fits the design of the program than to adapt the program to use existing classes.

Having said that, however, I agree that a better integration of FireFox on the Mac would be a good idea, especially for features like spell-checking, etc.
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