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

So what exactly does Apple want?

[st. augustine]

From the article: "What Apple objected to was not Aquafying Mozilla, but rather the way I was doing it via emulation, thus not giving Mozilla users a pure Aqua experience. Apple is willing to provide information for creating real Aqua experience for Mozilla."

Does Apple mean they insist that Mozilla use native OS X widgets if it wants to look like an Aqua application? From my (admittedly limited) understanding of the Mozilla architecture, this is impossible. 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.

Am I wrong? Please correct me. But it seems like the only thing you could do would be to write your own browser using native widgets, and embed the Gecko rendering engine, ala Galeon. Mozilla's not going to give you a "pure Aqua experience" unless you rewrite it from scratch.

Re:So what exactly does Apple want?

[bwilson]

The decision to make the interface custom was a result of the incredible mess that became of the previous cross-platform version. It is also necessary to provide custom controls to comply with CSS, which allows web pages to define button and scrollbar colors, for example.

IE defines its own controls for this reason (no kidding!), they just look like the Windows ones by default. Microsoft Word (and possibly the rest of Office) have all custom controls that look like the Windows ones. Sometimes the look is slightly off and if you look at the window hierarchy in Spy++ you'll notice that the buttons are not actually Windows, which is what you'd get with native widgets. So people shouldn't single out Mozilla for their criticism of its custom controls.

I used Mozilla on a Mac a while ago and I swear (much to my surprise) that it was using native widgets. Of course, it uses native menus, but the buttons and scrollbars seemed to be native as well, I played with the system configuration and the changes (like for scroll bar button configuration) seemed to be reflected in Mozilla. If this is the case, it should be easy to use native Aqua controls. Can somebody with a Mac confirm this?

Re:They want to see Mozilla running on OS X

[asa]

They want to see Mozilla running on OS X. That's why they don't care about an Aqua theme for Mozilla.

Mozilla runs well on OS X. It's called Fizzilla and you can get nightly and Milestone testing binaries with the rest of the Mozilla builds at http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/

--Asa

Re:/.ed, it seems

[jeffehobbs]

from the site, good news up top:

01/09/28/12:41

This morning, I finally talked to Apple on the phone. I admit that I over reacted to the whole situation. There was a forwarded email from my employer from Apple, which I misinterpreted. What Apple objected to was not Aquafying Mozilla, but rather the way I was doing it via emulation, thus not giving Mozilla users a pure Aqua experience. Apple is willing to provide information for creating real Aqua experience for Mozilla. Right now, my efforts are focused on an Aqua interface for Tenon's iTools, so work on Mozilla for the moment is in abeyance. I apologize to anyone that I have offended.

regards,
Eric

01/09/27/22:11

This evening, I went to visit /., and found myself on the front page of /.. There were mix feelings about my Aqua projects. I only wanted a browser that works well under Mac OS X, and looks like Aqua. Too bad, I am unable to share that joy anymore. I did not expect to get paid for fixing cocoa, but I felt bad that I helped Apple to write a interface library. Then I was denied to use this interface unless I used their library. In essence, why should I bother to help them with the interface when I am denied to use the interface. I just begin to enjoy working with Apple software, but Apple isn't making it easy for their developers. Anyways, I only hope that Apple would write cocoa UI for Mozilla, then I will not need this project. (OmniWeb is not good enough, yet)

01/09/27/11:34

You might notice that Aqua Mozilla was not updated recently, and the main reason was that Apple contacted my employer in attempt to shut down this project. After a few talk, I am forced to take down this project. Now I think of it, I went to Apple to test cocoa for Mac OS X 10.1, and found a drag and drop problem with NSPopUpButtonCell. They didn't even pay me for my effort, yet they try to shut down my project. Isn't that ironic? For you Mac OS X fans out there, if you want to use a good Mac OS X browser. You can only use IE or OmniWeb now. It sucks for us, but life goes on.

Re:Might make Aqua better...

[Arandir]

The designers at BMW do not really want you painting their cars in hippie rainbow colors, adding neon underneath and gluing crap to the hood.

But the designers at BMW aren't going to sue me if I paint the Virgin Mary on the hood!

What is OS X?

[2nd Post!]

If you want your shiny blue widgets... you can have XP.

I'm a little more scared of Microsoft, .NET, Hailstorm, Windows Media Player, DirectX, and the XBox, all under the same roof...

What evils lurk in the Microsoft Future?

Aqua is *the* OS X experience. It's more than just widgets; more than just a semitranslucent title bar, or glassy buttons, and drop shadows.

It's about an uncluttered 'Start bar' (called the Dock). Each App gets a single entry in the Dock, with access to the multiple open windows available through a single 'Window' menu; or if you right click on the app in the Dock, you get a list of the available windows.

It's about a the Apple Menu and a single menu, instead of a menu per Window. This has carried over from the previous OS 9; the foreground App, with User focus, controls the single available menu bar. There doesn't exist a menu for each window (which not only takes up screen real estate, it provides for too many available targets when all you use is a single target) but only a single global menu bar.

It's about minimizing screen clutter and noise. Instead of borders around each window you get a drop shadow; you delineate forground from background apps because the foreground App casts a shadow behind it. The background apps also have transparent title bars. You don't get every open Window listed in the Dock-the OS X Start bar. You don't get a menu bar attached to every window. You don't get a empty grey parent window containing all the child windows of Word or Photoshop.

It's not perfect, certainly, and it is, after all, the vision of a single person, a single company, quite unlike Linux and the Open Source/Free Software community.

There are little things, but mostly it's coherent. Most of the OS widgets are grayed out and monochromatic except when they are in focus or require attention; good visual cues. If you mistype your password when logging in, the login window shakes itself to both clear itself and to let you know you've failed to log in.

It's really, really, nice. Too bad most people are too cheap, or cannot otherwise afford, to play with Macs.

Aqua, and Mac Widgets

[mindstrm]

You know.. some things just don't work that well in an anarchy. Witness the failure of the unix desktop. Now.. I'm not slamming it, or trolling, I use it every day, and have for years... but unix still lacks a coherent desktop, even one as poor as Windows has. Why? Because nobody dictates what anyone else has to use. Now.. I'm not a fan of dictatorship.. however...

Apple has a point. They have *always* insisted on using proper API's for the Mac. Why? Because it ensure things WORK, and ensures they can bring out future versions of their OS without breaking stuff. IT's a GOOD thing.
Unlike MS, they don't use their proprietary widgets to corner the application market; the information on how to use them is free to all, no royalties.... no licenses (afiak).. nothing.
All they insist upon is that you use them. AND YOU SHOULD.

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.