RE: Awesome new Mozilla roadmap!

[Marco Pesenti Gritti <marco it gnome org>]

On Sat, 2003-04-05 at 08:52, Julien Olivier wrote:
> Le sam 05/04/2003 à 01:43, Sean Middleditch a écrit :
> > On Fri, 2003-04-04 at 18:00, Julien Olivier wrote:
> > 
> > > As for the HIG compliance, why not trying to make Phoenix HIG-compliant
> > > ? Why would'nt Phoenix developers want their app to be HIG-ified ?
> > 
> > This is the wonderful part of cross-platform GUI's.  Every platform has
> > a different HIG.  Mac OS X, KDE, GNOME, WinXP, others - they all have
> > different styles, etc.
> > 
> 
> You're right but...
> 
> > You cannot write a GUI that properly fits into all of these.  Phoenix is
> > an attempt to make a GUI that is consistant across all of these
> > environments, and thus has to work the way most of its users' would
> > expect (which generally means Windows' attempt at usability), and not
> > the way a GNOME user would expect.
> > 
> 
> but you can write a modular GUI and provide different defaults depending
> on the OS/desktop. That means that the GUI should be customizable but
> that doesn't mean that all those options should be user-visible. For
> example, GNOME version should come with CANCEL-NO-YES button order while
> Windows version would have YES-NO-CANCEL but there should not be a
> "re-order dialogs buttons" option in the preferences.

Exactly. Galeon/Epiphany are modular interfaces done to follow the GNOME
style :)
Doing the same with XUL is at best a lot harder than having a native
implementation. But actually ... it's probably just impossible.
Just to give and idea of things you'd have to do:

- Buttons order. Yeah this appear to be simple in theory. But I already
got a few bugs about our prompts ((we are more or less forced to use mozilla
interface but we can control buttons order)
- Menu layout. Well this is just a fork ...
- Preferences dialog. Eeeek prolly another fork ...
- Icons. I guess you would have to add linux only code to XUL.
- File dialogs. Native implementation to do, prolly conflicts between how
gtk one and windows one works.
- Help. Uhm special case code for GNOME ? We use their help ?
- Spacing, frames ... fork each dialog ?

Also I dont think mozilla developers would be so crazy to accept prefs
that control for example the menu layout. Do you imagine the pain to
mantain it ?
Their target is simply different, they are working on a multi platform
interface and they provide embedding technologies exactly for the
purpouse of native applications.
It's possible to make a multi platform interface a bit more integrated,
but making it really integrated means to special case everything.
I'm not even convinced the theme stuff will work perfectly and theme is just
a part of widgets consistence.


> > Epiphany/Galeon is a great idea becuase it presents an interface that
> > follows the HIG for a specific desktop interface (GNOME).  Konquerer or
> > KMozilla or whatever is great for KDE users, Camino for OS X users,
> > stock Phoenix for Windows users, Eiphany/Galeon for GNOME users, etc.
> > 
> 
> Really, I don't feel like splitting the user-base is a good idea.
> Software are great if they have a big user-base. So, if Phoenix can feel
> native on Windows, MacOSX, GNOME and KDE, it will have a BIG user-base
> and that will make it better (more users, more big reports, more
> developers, more themes, more extensions etc...).

The problem is that it will just not feel native ...

The important is to not split the Gecko user base.

Marco