Aqua Mozilla OK with Apple

MikeMo writes: "Turns out Apple thinks an Aqua Mozilla is OK, after all. Eric Yang had a chat with them and they made up." This is an update to this story.

Comments

Re:So what exactly does Apple want?

[Skuggan]

"Mozilla's appearance is all defined at run-time, and everything including its own buttons, menus, scroll bars, is a Mozilla custom component, not part of the OS standard UI toolkit."

This was the worst design decision(?spelling?) with Mozilla. Big, bloated GUI, slowing down the good, fast rendering engine. Who wanted this? Had someone had an overdoze of Winamp skins?

Priorities

[daceaser]

What worries me most is Apple's sense of priorities. They seem quite happy for someone to re-implement QuickTime for Linux as a third-party, yet they sue someone who creates a skin that looks like Aqua.

Does Apple think that colourful buttons are more valuable intellectual property than their video layer which they've spent the last 10 years developing?

Not that I mind QT for Linux, but the point stands. They'd rather have people buy a Mac for the shiny interface than the powerful graphics tools, or other _real_ technological assets.

I'm an Apple fiend, but sometimes the bods at Apple really leave me wondering...

Re:They want to see Mozilla running on OS X

[mr100percent]

Yes, it RUNS on OS X, but has noting else in common. The menu bar is pretty bare, the widgets are ugly looking X-windows bareness. A menu is jammed in every open menu, giving it the worst aspect of XWindows and Windows, as global options aren't in the global taskbar.

My only concern is that the OS X version might be slower to be updated, as platform-specific features to use Aqua are added.

Code exists to do this in the mozilla tree

[lordpixel]

Mac OS will create a button for you, if you ask it, but, like most modern OSes it will also just "draw" a button without any of the logic behind it, there is an API for that sort of thing.

So you get the look of a button without any of the native widget.

I once spent some time with a guy at netscape implementing a new protocol which basically took advantage of that.

You wrote something like:

theme://button?title=OK

and it returned a GIF containing a perfect looking OK button in the present Mac OS theme, be that Platinum on OS 9 or Aqua on OS X.

The code to do this is here:
http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/netwerk/prot ocol/theme/

Finshing this work would allow very high quality Aqua themes, as it wouldn't be "as" emulated. The OS would be drawing all of the controls.

This would also satisfy Apple - they don't really care about Aqua themes so much as making sure those themes *only* work on Mac OS. As the theme: protocol needs native code to work, it will only run on Mac OS (9 or X)

The theme protocol might also be needed on Linux (window manager theme support) and to do Windows XP properly.