Mozilla to use same Widgets on All Platforms 56
edgy
writes "Mozilla is going to use the same
web form widgets across Windows,
Unix, and Mac, so that the web pages look exactly the same
under all OS's. Can web developers apply styles to these
widgets so they can make it look like whatever they want
across all OS's? According to Mozillazine, they
can. Sounds very cool! " The page actually has screen shots of the
widgets. How long before someone make a GTK theme that looks like these?
They aren't bad.
That is ugly to me (Score:1)
those who are complaining are invited to fix whatever they see wrong, a branch in mozilla would in no way weaken it
Misinformed (Score:1)
Somehow, I doubt confusing all users on the Windows platform by giving them Mac-like widgets is really going to help Netscape's market percentage much.
Survay Topic (Score:1)
The new Mozilla widget scheme:
( ) Good
( ) Bad
( ) Huh?
Boo! (Score:1)
You customize the widgets, of course. Except, as things stand, you can't...
This isn't at all a hypothetical situation. The machine with the CD player on it is in pieces at the moment, but if you want to look at it, there's a screenshot of my desktop with it running on fvwm.themes.org, under circuit-theme. Then just imagine how sucky it would look with a standardized widget sitting in the middle of that display...
Good for Security (Score:1)
I wish I had the URL handy that I believe i saw on Slashdot a while back that had a nifty demonstration of exactly what i'm talking about in IE4. It would pop open a borderless javascript window that looked and felt like a Win95 PPP wizard that of course asked you to enter your name and password. Having done tech support at an ISP, I know that many people would fall for this trick. It would be slightly less likely to happen if the widgets had a different look for web pages.
I'll just be happy to get away from the ugly Motif look under linux for once:) Since Mozilla is open source I'm sure we'll be able to theme it, so everyone *SHOULD* be happy.
If anyone is listening i'd like to see the little N-Scroller widget (i know it has a name, but i'm drawing a blank) themeable easily as well. I remember back in the days of jeez must have been Netscape 1.0 or 2.0 that the mac people had some animated
Mozilla Rulez! (Score:1)
Mozilla just plain rulez.
Highlight on MouseOver?! (Score:1)
On the other hand, it is nice to have an "active" look to a control for when you're filling in a form with the keyboard. But not when you're just moving the mouse around.
ugly. (Score:1)
For that matter, I'm in favor of having a themeable UI library that can (a) look like any other widget set and whatnot (i.e. themeable) and (b) support all the calls of the other widget sets (their APIs and whatnot).
Then we can recompile everything against that, have only *one* library (as opposed to athena/athena-3d, motif/lesstif, GTK, Qt, etc.) and choose our look and feel for either the whole desktop, or on an application-by-application basis, or different for each virtual desktop, or whatever we want...
Heck, GTK would be a good start, since it's somewhat themeable, and there's so much interest in it already.
It's all about freedom of choice, which UNIX already offers, more than the other platforms do, and it'd be great to allow a consistency of user interface if desired, without having to rewrite every application with a new, incompatible toolkit, and still not necessarily be tied to a single API...
Of course, I don't have the necessary experience to do this, it'd require someone with the expertise of, say, Rasterman, or whoever made the other toolkits in the first place... (Xaw3d is a good example) But it's a project I'd love to see, and would be happy to support, test, or debug.
Uber Cool (Score:1)
Seriously though - the tabbed windows are just another non-standard entity, cool as they may be. Where are those defined in HTML 4.0 ? Oh, that's right - they're not. I guess they can be used for building NS's GUI, but I fear for web pages that go back to displaying "Best viewed with Mozilla"!!!
Boo! (Score:1)
that you could define forms which would look at
home on whatever system the user had -- Windows
widgets for Windows, Mac for Mac, etc.
Unless! These widgets are themeable, and the user can choose to override the theme with their choice.
What the HELL are they thinking? (Score:1)
This "cross-platform UI" bullshit is so incredibly wrongheaded I can't even begin to describe it. It will be the death of Mozilla, I swear it. I can tell you right now that Macintosh users will reject it if it's too nonstandard. That's why Internet Explorer is such stiff competition on both Macintosh and Windows -- it integrates with the operating system, it doesn't try to replace it or snub it.
And what's with this "controls changing their look on mouseover" bullshit? I mean, this draft is better than the previous (where a button didn't have an outline unless you put the pointer over it) but really, what are these people thinking?! Enabled controls should look like enabled controls. Period. Does Netscape have any objective human interface studies that they can show us to demonstrate that such behavior is really warranted, especially with respect to applications that use such controls when the operating system itself doesn't?
What did they say??? (Score:1)
> "... not look like any one particular platform, to avoid the perception of platform imperialism."
However, they bear a quite noticeable resemblance to the Mac UI.
F-U: What did they say??? (Score:1)
What the HELL are they thinking? (Score:1)
I agree with the argument about making the widgets in webpages look the same across different operating systems, it simply spoils the "consistent look and feel" metaphor of any given platform. We Linux users may not give a shoot about it, as we are in part used to disparate user interfaces. But it would give a Mac user nightmares to have one application that doesn't conform with the user interface standards of the Mac OS. Same for the other platforms.
I've always liked the purpose of the XPFE ever since it was announced; I'm aware of how much easier it makes it for the developers to add or change features in the code base that would be reflected on all target platforms with little or no platform-specific modifications. But actually forcing the user to do with a different look and feel on at least a single program is definitely an affront to the user. The possibility of allowing web developers of specifying a look and feel for their pages, and only for their pages is quite an advancement, though. I'd prefer the following: make the default look and feel be that of the hosting platform, but allow the web designer (and the user as well, why not?) to change it. This would allow the inclusion of the new feature, without making it into an insult for some.
WHY? (Score:1)
Also a web page doesn't behave or look like a native app so why should it use the same widget set. I think it would help a novice determine that a web page is different from an app on the system and be easier to understand.
I know all these benefits will be nil when the user uses another browser, but the unified widget set alleviates the problems for at least 50% of the time, so there is a benefit.
cristiana
They look ugly to me (Score:1)
--
Timur "too sexy for my code" Tabi, timur@tabi.org, http://www.tabi.org
Reminder: Java's non-standard garbage (Score:1)
You NEVER use images for replacement forms, and you NEVER use Java* because is proprietary non-standard garbage.
If your page isn't 100% usable on Lynx, it's not worthy of the web. No web page should -ever- use JavaScript or Java. Standards, people, think standards.
You can't assume that the browser is anything - anything. You have to assume it's Lynx - IE - Netscape - any of the new browsers.
Boo! (Score:1)
HTML 1.0 produces more reabable web pages than any other version because the browser actually decides the look/feel - how life ought to be.
WHY? (Score:1)
(BTW, please don't bring themes into it... I don't want to have to alter something to ensure Mozilla looks and acts like every other app on my OS, and that's probably the case for most people)
Boo! (Score:1)
What did they say??? (Score:1)
Boo! (Score:1)
I dunno, If I got too much time on my hands, or if I'm a masocist.
WHY? (Score:1)
The idea is to have two code paths, which will give the same widegets at first. One for the forms and another for the chrome and dialog boxes etc. Then you can replace the chrome/dialog widgets with a native widget library (eg based on GTK) if you want. Then the app will look like the platform, and the forms will still maintain their Mozilla look. You could also use native widgets for the forms if you wanted, but they wont look as nice.
In terms of themes, the forms will be controlled by the pages style sheet, and the applicaiton widgets would be controlled by Mozilla's style sheets (which will be downloadable vis the web), or by the native widget implementation.
-Jeremy
PS. These are my conclusions from the mozilla discussions, and may not represent reality, since I not doing the coding...
ahahah (Score:1)
oh well, perhaps this is what I want. Competition will determine the best browser. I'll be looking to either start or jump on a move to take NGLayout and port it to GTK+. My guess is that mozilla will fork very soon.
Very Mac-like... (Score:1)
---
Wha? TV & Movie Theme Songs? Oh yeah....
Human Interface Design (Score:1)
Too many GUI things are being designed by people who have absolutely no hard data to back up their ideas. The result: non-optimal design.
I like it!!! (Score:1)
Same arguments that led to IFC/Swing. (Score:1)
Since for any kind of tight page layout the size and behavior differences between platform widget sets is too great for an interface to look and work right on more than one, web interface design has had to tend towards sprawl and wasted space. With HTML 4.0 and decent stylesheet support, HTML/XML combined with stylesheets and good DOM support can be used as the windowing UI design language of choice. There is no GUI interface that you can't create with 5.x-generation browser engines... except...
As I think we all learned in the days of Java 1.0.x, even the best of the layout managers couldn't really achieve the goal of fully abstract UI design that would render usably with significantly different widgets sets. Even with GridBagLayout, a Java UI designed under Windows would often prove too tight to fit on its canvas when run on a Mac or Unix box. Developers ended up spending inordinate amounts of time rearranging blocks of widgets in their layouts and expanding the canvas in order to account for all the differences. There was also the matter of the way MacOS in particular lacked keyboard equivalents for much UI navigation, along with other subtle differences in the way the "same" kind of widget (a pulldown, a select list...) behaves in different OSes and widget sets.
This led to Netscape creating its own across-the-board widget set called IFC, which they later turned over to Sun as the foundation of Swing, which allows both pluggable skins with more tolerance for abstraction, and for those cases where abstraction just doesn't cut it, the ability to force a specific widget set.
Scrolling web pages are okay and all, but they're not the way people usually like to get work done. If we want to be able to build HTML/XML interfaces that offer the same tight feel of a traditional windowing GUI when they're being rendered under one, we need to be able to get specific about our widgets.
Where this might have been horrifying in the old days, as an example of HTML being bent into a design language rather than one of abstract interfaces, code written for a scheme like this can safely be written with the same kind of mode-independence "purist" HTML has always had, the difference being that now design specificity can ride on top of it.
Highlight on MouseOver?! (Score:1)
OS/2 Widgets (Score:1)
what are they (Score:1)
Mac Users (Score:1)
Yeah, Mac users will certainly reject non-standard widgets. Look at MS Office 4.2, which was slammed for looking too much like Windows (although it didn't).
That is, except for the Mac users too busy hating Microsoft to load IE!
Good to see (Score:1)
;-)
Not bad but not great (Score:1)
What the HELL are they thinking? (Score:1)
you might have to pick just one or the other. IE and most new microsoft programs have widgets that change on mouse-over etc. -- very, very much like these new mozilla widgets. (those widgets aren't actual HTML pages rendered in IE; just most of the rest of the GUI. it's very inconsistent)
also, i don't mean to be rude, but i guess i'm not the only one who has noticed that when somebody follows an unsubstantiated assertion with this sentence: "Period.", that can generally be taken as a tacit admission that the preceding statement is blatantly contrary to fact. just a thought.
Good and bad (Score:1)
But there is at least one good side to this:
It will be great for embedded use of Mozilla. One of the companies I do consulting for is building a (Linux based) set top box thingie (well, not really going after the same market as WebTV etc., but..), and have been considering Mozilla for the browser, but since we won't be running X (too damn big - flash isn't cheap), we would've had to implement the entire widget set.
It's not that big a deal - the new UI code in Mozilla is pretty lean - but with this, hopefully we'll only have to implement a thin drawing layer instead. That would be great. I'll have to take a new look at the Mozilla source soon.
No GTK? YESSS!! (Score:1)