On Jan 29, 2009, at 10:32 AM, Paweł Prażak wrote:
>
>
>
> On Jan 28, 10:18 pm, "Ben Goodger (Google)" <b...@chromium.org> wrote:
>> First of all let me generally comment that this entire situation is a
>> clusterf*ck. I am not happy with the technical constraints imposed by
>> Linux and its assorted UIs on Chrome's UI and feature set.
>
> Why? What do you mean by "technical constraints imposed by Linux"?
> (really, I'd like to know)
> Something you consider a "constraint" others may name a feature.
They're allowed to be wrong ;-)
>> For me, one priority is to ensure we deliver a good experience to
>> most
>> users and while doing so we're able to rapidly improve Chrome over
>> the
>> course of time.
>
> To do it you must understand needs and preferences of users on etch
> platform.
This discussion is exactly about doing that, but Linux makes it harder
than other platforms. It's hard enough to build a browser, but
building it once for QT/KDE, once for Gnome/GTK, etc. is pretty much
out of the question. Instead we'll have to pick one set of UI
behaviors that feels right to the largest proportion of Linux users
that we can find. Just to re-iterate: the goal isn't to target every
linux user and their preferences, but rather to figure out what will
work best for *most* linux users.
This set of hard choices will *absolutely* run afoul of many personal
choices that some (maybe large) percentage of Linux users may make.
That's OK. Not great, but acceptable.
>> My other priority is to ensure that the core essence of Chrome's
>> design makes it to each of our platforms.
>
> But you also should respect that there are different platforms because
> people wants to do things in different ways, so single platform will
> somehow take away their ability to have choice. And Linux is all about
> choice.
...hence Chromium for Linux and Mac aren't being done as "ports" of
the Windows UI, but rather ground-up re-implementations. The goal is
absolutely to get a great *native* experience for each platform. The
difficulty is that "Linux" isn't a platform. At best it's several
platforms. At worst, it's a bunch of packages shipped to a
distribution site and picked one-by-one by users.
For you Linux might be about *your* choices, but for software authors
trying to target Linux, it's about trying to square that flexibility
with the need to ship software once and be able to do all the other
things that are required to guarantee stability, performance, and
security.
>> A key aspect to this is the
>> "Skyline" of the browser with tabs merging with the title bar and the
>> general visual design.
>
> And that is the first thing I don't actually like in chrome, I just
> like tabs bellow address bar, it makes more sense to me.
...then you don't want Chrome.
You'll be happy to know that there are some other great KHTML/Webkit
based browsers for linux, should you not prefer Chrome.
>> On Linux, it seems fewer of these conditions exist.
> What you call inconsistency is what I call choice.
That's ok. We can still call it inconsistency and you can do the
translation between the words in your mailer. Double-plus-good Linux
speak FTW!
>> However, I don't think there's an easy answer here. It'd be a shame
>> to
>> have to spend a long time retrofitting views to support a HIG that
>> doesn't represent consensus on Linux. The Mozilla project has spent a
>> decade now trying to make XUL look good on different platforms, and
>> to
>> my eye there are still many problems.
>
> I realize that it's very difficult and I really hope you will make
> right decisions and Chromium Linux port will rock!
I think everyone working on it wants exactly the same thing and is
raising the point that there are hard choices to be made exactly
because making them is the only way to guarantee a great, Chrome-like
experience.
Regards
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