
Chromium on Linux replacing GTK+ - PuercoPop
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!topic/chromium-dev/Zpu9801pPRc
======
pervycreeper
I recently bought a chromebook, and was surprised at how nice the user
experience was. Tasks like opening tabs and loading pages seemed subjectively
faster than doing the same on my 4GHz desktop. I also like how my attention
was never consumed by irrelevant details like it always is in a desktop os.

In places where GNOME treats the user like an idiot by needlessly hiding
useful functionality, Chrome makes specific tasks quick and painless. Surely,
the fact that Chrome tries to do less, and benefits from a clean slate helps
this, but there is still a very clear winner in this comparison.

I'd use it (chrome os) a lot if it had decent native text editing, and wasn't
a botnet.

Hopefully a WM comparable in performance and UI design to Chrome's will be
supported in GNU/Linux distros soon.

~~~
netcan
_" I'd use it (chrome os) a lot if it had decent native text editing"_

 _I 'd_ buy one or two for relatives if it had skype. Seems chrome is one
feature/app away for a lot of people. Reminds me of this.
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html)

~~~
makmanalp
I think as long as google voice / hangouts is competing for that position,
it's unlikely. Skype for linux has historically been kind of a disaster, so I
don't expect a chrome app effort from them either.

~~~
thefreeman
Skype works perfectly fine on linux natively and has for a while.

~~~
outworlder
Only if you are just interested in texting. The sound support is outdated,
unmaintained (and therefore, buggy) and has been for a while now.

~~~
makomk
I've found that even text chat is so buggy in Skype for Linux as to be almost
unusable.

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teddyh
So they’re replacing GTK+ with something called Aura. What is Aura? “ _The
goal is to produce a new desktop window manager and shell environment_ ”¹. So
they’re doing another Unity?

1) [http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/aura-
des...](http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/aura-desktop-
window-manager)

~~~
darklajid
I still don't get what Aura is, but thought 'Oh, are they creating XUL now?'
instead. So far these design documents aren't enough for me to understand what
this is _actually_ for.

~~~
checker659
They have their own compositor and uses a model based around Views (yes,
similar to NSView / UIView).

~~~
tluyben2
So I don't have to work with HTML/CSS then? I seem to have a disorder which
makes me dislike a separate language for layout/design than the one I'm
writing the other code in. And although I do a lot of it and am good at it, I
don't like HTML/CSS at all; I have not seen a real world case outside
documents and informative sites (which are documents anyway) where I could not
build a more robust (and a _lot_ faster) interface in less time in Cocoa with
Objective C / C# / C++. No clue what is wrong with people trying to do
everything in HTML/CSS. </rant>

Anyway; being lazy; so this is kind of a GUI layer on top of HTML/CSS?

~~~
bengoodger
This is nothing like XUL. It's just some abstraction layers written in C++.
The hygiene from the Chromium side is that it allows us to share some code
with abstractions we already have for the web platform.

Chrome UI on Windows, ChromeOS and soon Linux are comprised of a few layers:

Views (widget toolkit abstraction) - tabs, buttons, textfields, etc. Aura
(window/"native widget" abstraction, event dispatching, what most code at
layers above would consider to be the XWindow, except the XWindow is
abstracted (and there is only one XWindow per top level browser window)) CC -
(Chrome Compositor, also used for web content.)

They're all in native code since being able to drop down to the metal (& grab
the app's toplevel XWindow) is often useful when building a desktop UI.
HTML/JS/CSS binding to CC is limited to Blink.

~~~
Touche
Hi Ben, why is Aura not coming to OSX?

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checker659
OSX users are perceptive enough about the nuances of cocoa that recreating all
the UI quirks and what not is a huge undertaking. If I had my sanity intact, I
would just stick to cocoa.

~~~
Touche
Aura doesn't attempt to recreate the UI quirks of the host platform.

~~~
checker659
Exactly my point. To not do so is a crime on osx.

~~~
Touche
How is it a crime on OSX and not on Windows or Linux. I'm not understanding
your point.

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bengoodger
I used to be more religious about this sort of thing... but the religion falls
apart even on OS X when you realize that even WebKit implements its own copy
of the native controls that can appear in web content - so that they can be
transformed and animated using CSS.

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nly
Why don't they fix the issues with the current UI that _aren 't_ GTK+s fault
before they go and ditch it and introduce a whole new world of pain?

As far as I can tell, Chromium on Linux has been useless on high DPI screens
since its inception. On my 15" laptop at 1920x1080 (just 140dpi) the fonts on
browser tabs, and the tabs themselves, are too small and cannot be changed. I
simply can't use the browser because of this.

Firefox, which has its own abstraction layer but uses janky old GTK+2 under
the hood, does just fine.

I really don't care about extreme OpenGL rendering (laughable, aren't most
accelerations disabled already due to driver whitelisting?) or the tiny
fraction of the UI that is noticeably GTK+

~~~
jeorgun
High-DPI support is coming with Aura (or, more accurately, being built _on_
Aura; it looks like the high-DPI stuff will come slightly later):

[https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=143619](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=143619)

~~~
finishingmove
Great, but let's hope it doesn't start looking crap on regular DPI displays.
You know, like those hipster websites that make your eyes bleed if you try to
read them on anything other than a Retina display. "Most people I know use
MacBooks anyway"

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jsnell
It feels like a premature launch. When I got this from chrome-unstable a
couple of weeks ago, it was a shock. Many styling problems, and widgets not
working as expected. Some of the stuff that didn't work was pretty niche (e.g.
horizontal scroll-wheels), so it's understandable nobody noticed it. But
there's even stuff like central UI elements (tabs, the URL box) being rendered
in some big, ugly and badly hinted font instead of the system font. Menu items
having just insane amounts of whitespace, etc.

There might be good technical reasons for the change, but on a UX level it
feels unfortunate :-( I still remember how nice it felt to switch from Firefox
to the initial Chrome Linux alphas. It might have been missing major
functionality, but at least it looked and worked the way I expected a Linux
desktop app to work instead of having the UI be just a little bit off in a
dozen places. I'm sure they'll get it to a 99% state soon enough, but getting
that last 1% looks like it could be a challenge.

~~~
JamesMcMinn
"premature launch"..."chrome-unstable".

This is not a launch. You are running the UNSTABLE build. What do you expect?

Stop treating unstable and testing software like it's stable. The clue is in
the name.

~~~
jsnell
I'm not treating it as it's stable, but it's what's going to be released as
stable in a fairly short while given the Chrome release cadence. I was hoping
that they were going to let this bake for a bit more before making it the
default. This post makes it clear that they aren't going to do that.

~~~
JamesMcMinn
Generally, unstable things that appear in unstable channel will only appear in
stable 6 months later. That's plenty of time to iron out bugs.

Perhaps you should consider the beta channel?

~~~
jsnell
I'm totally fine using unstable, thanks. The point is that this particular
feature is going to be enabled by default in Chrome 35 on Linux, as per the
submitted article. That's not going to be 6 months from now. What happens with
unstable features in the general case isn't particularly relevant when we know
what the plan is with this specific case.

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optymizer
I found the last 2 comments in that thread ironic. One guy's asking why Aura
is a window manager, and 'mike' says Aura is not a window manager, Ash is the
window manager, but then proceeds to supply a link which has 'aura-window-
manager' in the url! His link doesn't even mention the word 'Ash'.

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milliams
So they're making their own thing rather than using something widely tested
and used like Qt?

~~~
paulyg
They already made their own thing for Chrome OS rather than use GTK/Gnome or
Qt/KDE there.

I find it sad that they felt the need to make their own UI engine vs being
able to contribute the changes they feel they need to an existing project. I'm
sure Google engineers will tell you that they need to move faster than they
could working within the community of GTK or Qt. Plus they don't want Chrome
OS to suck because they can't get features merged by the community. They are
valid points. The resulting fragmentation just sucks.

I assume Aura is open source. Given GTK's dropping adoption rate and a lot of
people unhappy with the recent direction (design or lack of listening to
current user base) of Gnome how long until someone writes a general purpose
(not specific to Chrome OS) window manager/desktop environment on top of it?

~~~
Touche
I don't see that ever happening. Google does a lot of reinventing the wheel
with their projects and most of it is not built in a way that is easily
useable in downstream projects, and they probably won't accept patches
anyways. Chromium OS, for example, could have been forked and used in a lot of
cool ways but that hasn't happened yet and I doubt it will.

~~~
threedaymonk
> Chromium OS, for example, could have been forked and used in a lot of cool
> ways but that hasn't happened yet and I doubt it will.

Well, there's CoreOS, though the end result is rather different.

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ksk
Google knows that the Open Source development process while nice and warm and
fuzzy, can get in your way when you don't own the entire development of the
project - especially if this is a product that can impact your revenue. Others
can arbitrarily (sometimes with good reason) block your feature pushes and
slow down your product releases. They did the right thing forking webkit,
keeping Android/Chromium in-house, and are doing the right thing here. - IMHO.

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pjmlp
All seem to leaving GTK+ behind.

~~~
baldfat
GTK+ looked old in 2003. Hasn't gotten better (Stares at XFCE).

~~~
bliker
What? I think it looks better than ever
[http://i.imgur.com/PJdqYfT.png](http://i.imgur.com/PJdqYfT.png)

~~~
sandGorgon
duude - what theme is that ? and what CSS skin for HN are you using ?

~~~
work_account_2
I don't know about the gtk theme. Possibly part of the ElementaryOS project?

The HN skin is actually a Chrome extension called Hacker News Extension Suite.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
enhanc...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
enhancement-s/bappiabcodbpphnojdiaddhnilfnjmpm?hl=en)

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m_ram
debs/rpms: [http://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-
channel](http://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel)

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izacus
Hopefully this finally means retina display (HiDPI) support for Windows builds
- currently Chrome is almost unusable on all high-res displays on Windows.

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donniezazen
It would be interesting to hear why they didn't pick something like Qt.

~~~
72deluxe
Perhaps to control their own destiny? They don't need that many controls. Only
buttons, tabs and text boxes.

~~~
Touche
How does using an open-source UI framework surrender control? Seems far more
likely NIH is the answer.

~~~
72deluxe
Qt is not truly open source for other platforms though is it?

~~~
Touche
What do you mean "other platforms"? Qt is GPL, or am I wrong?

~~~
PuercoPop
Although you are technically wrong, it is LGPL, you are right. It is dually-
licensed, but it doesn't vary according to the target platform.

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vecio
Some bugs for several years finally fixed. Still no HiDPI support.

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yukichan
I wonder if this will include the GDK+ used for the webrtc demo app. Probably
not, but one can hope, that sample app is super buggy.

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username42
Is aura another competitor for mir and wayland ?

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dschiptsov
Thank god it is not Qt (following Ubuntu insanity) but something sane, small
and good enough.

