Google To Replace GTK+ With Its Own Aura In Chrome

sfcrazy writes "Google's Chromium team is working on an alternative of Gtk+ for the browser, called Aura. Elliot Glaysher, a Google developer explains, 'We aim to launch the Aura graphics stack on Linux in M35. Aura is a cross-platform graphics system, and the Aura frontend will replace the current GTK+ frontend.' The Free Software community is debating: is Google trying to do Canonical? Couldn't Google just switch to Qt, which is becoming an industry standard?"

Someone please explain

[LordLimecat]

Why it really matters whether Google uses QT or GTK or their own stack. I mean for a GDE or distro like Ubuntu, I can see that "make another one" matters because it impacts all sorts of other projects. For Chrome, though, it doesnt really affect anyone else that I can see, and its really just Gnome folks being upset that Google didnt want to use their stack. At the end of the day, isnt it just more work for Google? If theyre happy to do it, who cares?

And-- though Im not privy to all of the politics-- Ive gotten the impression that the GTK3 folks werent terribly interested in hearing other people's thoughts.

Re:Just for a browser?

[peppepz]

Because GTK2 is bit-rotting and GTK3 is bound to GNOME.

Re:Someone please explain

[Anonymous Coward]

Double-post, but why is this in the news now? All of the linked design docs are from Dec 2011. This stuff is 2 years old.

It's going live now. The stuff has been experimental for that time, it's just now being pushed into Release builds.

Fun fact is that Aura is already enabled on Windows, this is why scrollbars, buttons, combos and everything else now looks like shit and are missing usability features that every other scrollbar on the system has.

Re:Someone please explain

[williamhb]

Why it really matters whether Google uses QT or GTK or their own stack. I mean for a GDE or distro like Ubuntu, I can see that "make another one" matters because it impacts all sorts of other projects. For Chrome, though, it doesnt really affect anyone else that I can see, and its really just Gnome folks being upset that Google didnt want to use their stack. At the end of the day, isnt it just more work for Google?

I guess it depends whether their interest in it is limited to "we need something to write Chrome using, and GTK isn't doing it for us any more" or whether they will later be saying "come write apps for Chrome and ChromeOS using NaCl and Aura". Google has taken on their own UI stack -- is their only interest in it really to write just one application? If it is instead another step in the direction of encouraging developers to write apps that only work in Google's browser, that would be interesting to hear.

But I haven't looked into it closely.

Re:Just for a browser?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Except that this "standard C++" is total crap that doesn' even offer proper reflection, which is the whole reason why Gtk+ went on to create this "weird kitchen sink object system" (so that creating the bindings to all the dozens of different languages used in a typical Un*x system were as simple as possible). And why - wonder of wonders - Qt did the same, to improve this "object shitstem" of C++. I think a discerning observer might start seeing a pattern at this point...

Re:Just for a browser?

[martin-boundary]

This is exactly how Microsoft fought the browser wars in the 1990's. By introducing deliberately incompatible, piecemeal and nonstandard ways of doing things, and making them defaults on Windows. Google does the same on Android and ChromeOS. Microsoft had Windows on every PC, except Apples. Google has Android on every smartphone, except Apples. You might ask, why should the Free Software Community care? Well, it used to be that Android was basically a linux distro. Linux distros are nice, because the user can replace anyting he likes and make everything just so. That works because the free software isn't just gratis, but has the kind of license that promotes collaboration, and a community of devs and users. Google have horrible licences, and want to replace existing software that runs unchanged on lots of OSes and architectures with their own, then bundle it with Android. In this way, you end up with an OS that runs proprietary software nobody except Google can change (realistically), and runs on every piece of hardware you can buy in stores (except Apples). It spies on you, and rams ads down your throat. And the ubiquitous Free Software we became used to in the internet boom years will become less available, since it won't run on the hardware people will want to buy.