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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
byEnderandrew ( 866215 ) writes:
Chrome should have been built on top of Qt from day 1. You'd have tight integration with Webkit, a great toolkit, and cross-platform from day 1 on Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris.
Google opted for VERY Windows-centric design which made porting hard, and then the man tasked with porting to Linux choose a poor toolkit and then blamed the Linux platform for two bad decisions in a row made by Google.
I have zero sympathy.
bycygnusx ( 193092 ) writes:
> Chrome should have been built on top of Qt from day 1.
RTFA.
I sincerely wonder, why didn't you just use Qt for the UI from the
beginning? It blends very well with the native look&feel on each
platform, while still letting you implement the distinctive Chrome
features. Qt 4.5 will even have native look in GNOME.
Ben Goodger:
In general, we've avoided cross platform UI toolkits because while
they may offer what superficially appears to be a quick path to native
looking UI on a variety of target platforms, on
byEnderandrew ( 866215 ) writes:
I've read the BS answer, and it is BS.
First off, Qt apps look and operate just fine on Mac and Windows. They don't jump out as looking "foreign" to the platform, where as Chrome on Windows does look extremely foreign in its UI design. This isn't an issue here.
Secondly, Qt provides VASTLY more functionality than GTK, and wouldn't limit what Chrome could do on Windows or Linux. Chrome didn't choose seperate platform codebases to better enable those platforms. The Chrome devs admitted they wrote a very Windows-centric app because they didn't know anything about Linux and coded how they knew how to with what they were familiar with. Again, this reasoning is completely BS.
Lastly, the advantages of cross-platform development not only means no initial time to fork, but it means fewer bugs, less complexity, and the entire life of the project with have a much smaller codebase to manage. Ignoring that major advantage is foolish at best.
Then when you consider how well Qt and Webkit are natively bound, and how well Qt deals with multiple processes and multithreading, it was just plain dumb to not build Chrome on Qt from day 1.
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bymythz ( 857024 ) writes:
Maybe your ok with "Qt apps look and operate just fine on Mac and Windows", but Google wants to build "the best browser they possibly could" for the most popular platform available, end of story.
They've ended up producing the fastest browser available with a simple, clean and unobtrusive UI.
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byEnderandrew ( 866215 ) writes:
Building on Qt wouldn't have slowed down the browser any. The browser's "speed" comes from the JS engine. Qt would have made bindings to Webkit easier, and Qt is actually a very fast toolkit. Chrome might actually be faster on Qt.
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byBlakey Rat ( 99501 ) writes:
First off, Qt apps look and operate just fine on Mac and Windows.
No.
Better than GTK+, definitely. Not "just fine." Not even good. Especially on Mac, where they're extremely weird in many fundamental ways.
Typically, people saying things like this about cross-platform frameworks really have little or no experience designing GUI apps-- they don't have the eye for detail that that job requires, and they literally don't see anything wrong with the QT apps. But find an advanced Mac user, show them two UIs and tell them to pick-out the QT one, they'll get it 100% of the time.
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byEnderandrew ( 866215 ) writes:
A Qt browser on Windows looks just as native as Firefox, or Opera, or Chrome. Note, every one of those browsers uses a non-standard UI. Qt provides styles to mimic native widgets and can look perfectly native. Chrome wasn't even designed to look native. They are blowing smoke to obfuscate the reality of the situation.
Chrome wouldn't have looked one ounce more "foreign" because of Qt. It looks foreign because they designed it foreign.
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byvisualight ( 468005 ) writes:
Are you saying that "just fine" equates to "indistinguishable from whatever Apple uses?"
I don't understand how being able to recognize that two UI's weren't built with the same toolkit means anything.
Wouldn't you expect that to always be true no matter what?
byZorbaTHut ( 126196 ) writes:
Well, yes, you would, which is exactly the point. You shouldn't be able to. The UI should look like part of the OS - it should conform to the OS standards, behave in the same way as every other program on the OS, etc etc etc.
Most toolkits don't manage this. Some fail stunningly (see Java/Swing), some are relatively close (QT), none, to my knowledge, are perfect.
So, in answer to your question: yes, "just fine" equates to "indistinguishable from whatever Apple uses". Apple uses the OSX native API, and your ap
byBlakey Rat ( 99501 ) writes:
Are you saying that "just fine" equates to "indistinguishable from whatever Apple uses?"
Duh? Isn't that the *point* of the entire exercise?
bySycraft-fu ( 314770 ) writes:
What I mean by that is most of the QT apps I've seen are ones where the UI is completely and totally non-standard. They have their own idea of how things should look and work that has zero to do with how things on the system look and work.
A good example that I mess with would be EastWest's Play sampler. It's QT, though they don't seem to advertise the fact (I noticed it installing the QT DLLs). It also looks more like an old school piece of audio hardware than a computer application. It's interface actually
byAnonymous Coward writes:
I am a Chromium developer, and if you don't think Qt apps "speak with a foreign accent", especially on Mac, you don't pay close enough attention. It's not an immediate appearance difference, it's the way that subtle details are wrong. By contrast, Chromium appears _very_ different on Windows on the surface, but we go to great lengths to get small details right. Big differences can be accommodated. Small differences drive you crazy.
Also, most of us were Linux developers, not Windows developers, before writing Chromium, so again you are asserting things that are completely wrong.
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bypherthyl ( 445706 ) writes:
>> am a Chromium developer, and if you don't think Qt apps "speak with a foreign accent", especially on Mac
Mac is a bit of a special case. The new Qt is built on cocoa which should fix most of these issues.
Anyway Mac is not even an issue here. Right now you get ZERO support for Mac with the current approach to Chrome development. On windows is looks foreign (not bad, but definitely not like any other app). On Linux, the browser is alpha at best, and because of GTK won't integrate properly into an
byEnderandrew ( 866215 ) writes:
Please mod parent up.
byLaskoVortex ( 1153471 ) writes:
Small differences drive you crazy.
BS.
BS, but not complete BS. Small differences drive the highly sensitive *UI designer crazy*. 99.9% of end users (the ones that don't program UIs) don't care at all. I've got a multitude of apps running on my OS X box. The native cocoa ones are iTunes, Mail, Terminal, Preview, and Disk Utility. The best UI, though, is probably firefox. I have a scientific program (motif?) running via X-forwarding. It looks fine. No one is going to sweat the details like how wide the scroll buttons are or an off-shade border ar
byshutdown -p now ( 807394 ) writes:
I've been writing Qt software (Windows end users mostly) and have never received a single complaint about look and feel. Qt fits in just great.
I can attest to that. I'm mostly a Windows user, and I used to be very picky about how native my applications look, but I never had a problem with either Qt3 or Qt4 in that respect. Yes, there were some really minor differences by which you could tell an application is Qt-written, but it's something you had to be actively looking for (unlike Swing, which is in-your-face about it with its ugly fonts, non-native file dialogs etc).
byEnderandrew ( 866215 ) writes:
There have been several blog posts (on the Chromium blog) and interviews that explain the reason that Chrome was written Windows only at first was because the main devs only knew Windows.
Chrome/Chromium was a big project with tons of devs, and took something like three years (which encompassed a timespan when Google fervently denied any interest in developing a browser, much like the Android cycle featured repeated denials by Google of any interest in the phone market). So I'm sure in the several years of
byAdam Jorgensen ( 1302989 ) writes:
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh, so you're one of the people responsible for us NOT havng Chrome on Linux yet?
Way to go dude...
Seriously, I was excited by Chrome.
The failure of a linux version to appear this century has made me a lose a lot of faith though.
Simple fact is, other people and companies out there manage to produce cross-platform applications
which don't look like crap.
Why can't you?
I'm guessing your story is a lot like that of MySQL Workbench...
It was .NETified and Windowsified to the hilt and the
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byPhilip_the_physicist ( 1536015 ) writes:
Even if they had used QT, there is still the problem of annoyances like the placement of the main control panel. Does it go under Options, or under Edit, or under Tools, or in the application menu (like OS X apps)? Do you use separate floating (and dockable) toolbars for everything or do you use the Windows idioms of either panels (like the MS Office 2003 task pane or the Firefox sidebar) or dialogue boxes? All these differences in UI tradition between platforms mean that your program will always seem a lit
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