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Comment by cmelbye | Hacker News Reader

It's funny, his main example of a "high quality cross platform app" was Mozilla Firefox. In my opinion, Mozilla Firefox is a prime example of why the intermediate layers (if Firefox uses one, I'm not sure) and the cross platform stuff is a bad idea. It uses its own weird certificate store instead of using the operating system's, its interface does not have a Cocoa feel in any sense of the term, etc.

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But we're talking about whether cross platform apps are of such a low quality that banning that outright is a good thing, how can anyone suggest Firefox isn't a counter example to that?! Compare Firefox to the average App Store offering and I think its obvious that this Section 3.1.1 is bullshit. This move by Apple is just an attack on Adobe that is catching innocent developers in the crossfire.

I doubt we'll see Firefox using Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL, Core Data or any other of a number of APIs available for the Mac platform anytime soon. Because even if Firefox pretends to really well, first-class citizen of Mac OS X it ain't.

Firefox may not have a Cocoa feel but he prefers it over Safari anyway since it serves him better. So apparently native look 'n feel isn't all that for some people in their choice of applications.

I feel the same way about Safari on my iPhone. I quickly ditched that for a better browser.

Which browser is that?

I use iCab Mobile because I can't browse without being able to open links in background tabs and I like its fullscreen mode as well.

> So apparently native look 'n feel isn't all that for some people in their choice of applications.

Heresy in Mac-land. This is contrary to just about everything the Mac GUI has historically tried to support/enforce.

XUL+Javascript is the UI intermediary.

There are a great number of application that does not have a native look and feel, does not use built-in resources from the operating systems that I use and yet I think they are great (Firefox, Vim, Apache Directory Studio), even WebKit (and WebKit2) is a cross platform layer on top of WebCore[1][2].

[1]: http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/HighLevelOverview

[2]: http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2

WebKit is a framework not an application. Safari is the application. The UI layer is still Cocoa.

I do not said that WebKit is an application, I said it is a layer on top of WebCore.

No, if anything, Firefox is proof that you can write a bad 'native application' in C directly with the APIs provided by the OS. It's entirely possible to write something that is more native than Firefox but is based on another language, like Ruby, a Lisp, ML, etc.

Firefox isn't written directly on top of the OS APIs. It's written on top of NSPR (Netscape Portable Runtime) on the bottom, with layers of more compat piled on top.

And NSPR is written in C as a thin layer over the OS APIs. Just because it's C doesn't magically imbue whatever uses it with super-awesome-native qualities.

It's more accurate to say that Firefox 3.6 is written on top of the Mozilla 1.9.1 platform, which includes technologies such as NSPR or XPCOM for some low level system interaction. I don't think anything at the UI rendering level uses those technologies.

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