Re: [Banshee-List] banshee vs songbird

[Alexandre <airmind gmail com>]

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 6:08 PM, LCID Fire <lcid-fire gmx net> wrote:

Brad Taylor wrote:

Actually, Firefox theming is quite supported and actively used:

  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:2

In fact for a while, I had my Firefox looking like Google Chrome.

Being skinnable doesn't prevent Songbird from looking like Gtk+, in fact
it enables someone to write that support[1].
 

The point of Firefox is that it AFAIK does not use it's own window drawing but uses the one provided by the windows manager. If I remember correctly (it's a while back so I could be wrong), firefox sets up a gtk window and thus you gain all the nice buzz like composite, etc. The last thing I hear was that they're preparing for a qt port since it currently doesn't integrate into kde too good.
With Songbird it seems to me that they are doing their own window drawing (hints: Having the menu bar inside the window, composite not working) which does not seem a very good design choice to me since it was one of the things that massively turned me of.
With limited theming support I meant in contrast to Firefox 1 where you could rebuild the entire ui to your liking - something that's AFAIK not possible to this extend anymore (but who wants such a thing anyway?).

The undelying code is the same. You can still skin the entire Firefox window (maybe with Firefox 3 changes you might lose a little bit of control). It's just that FIrefox is making an effort to look like the underlying OS / toolkit (Gtk in this case), so it better integrates with other apps, while Songbird is doing the opposite, it wants to look the way it is skinned. It's the approach of most media players (Winamp, WMP, MPlayer, XMMS, ...). I think it's more historical then anything else. The Firefox port to Qt is more about feeling then looking. It just feels not natural to use a Qt app in Gnome, or a Gtk app in KDE (Firefox case), but there are ways to theme both toolkits to look like the other, but it'll feel weird.
The Banshee / Rhythmbox approach to look like any other app in the system is much better IMO. It integrates much better with the desktop.

Anyway, Songbird is cool, it's meant to be extensible as much as Firefox is, and that can bring some cool addons to it, but it'll never integrate with the desktop the way Banshee does. In the long term, Banshee can do much better then Songbird.
 

ym2c

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