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Google To Replace GTK+ With Its Own Aura In Chrome
sfcrazy writes "Google's Chromium team is working on an alternative of Gtk+ for the browser, called Aura. Elliot Glaysher, a Google developer explains, 'We aim to launch the Aura graphics stack on Linux in M35. Aura is a cross-platform graphics system, and the Aura frontend will replace the current GTK+ frontend.' The Free Software community is debating: is Google trying to do Canonical? Couldn't Google just switch to Qt, which is becoming an industry standard?"
And then again, why should anyone have a say on what toolkit Google decide to use for their own browser? Did "the Free Software Community" have anything to say when it was slang vs ncurses, emacs vs vim, gtk vs qt, gnome vs kde? No, because exploring alternate solutions is good for the whole community in the long run. Please stop this poisonous attitude of finding "enemies of the people" among people who dare write free software.
Reading through the documents, it doesn't look like a trivial task to recompile all your GTK-2 apps against it. From the UI Toolkit standpoint, it looks like a combination of NextStep and Swing.
AFAIKT Aura is a more than just a UI Toolkit, it's a complete Window Manager. A replacement for Gnome (wow! I hope that takes off!) Apparently it's been running on the Chromebooks. Here is Linus' take on the topic.
The main reason I would be reticent to use it is because Google doesn't always have a strong commitment to backwards compatibility. So you may end up having to rewrite pieces of your code, just to keep them compiling. If you're ok with that though, go for it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I came here to say this.
I'm quite the fan of Qt, but it's far from an industry standard. HTML5 + wrapper probably has as much, if not more, adoption.
And, once you use iOS or Android to dev GUI, some modern, convenient, and well-crafted patterns begin to emerge. They're not perfect, but they're nice to use. Honestly, if Google wants to use their own toolkit and publish it as open source, why should anyone complain about that? Some very interesting ideas may come out of it and be brought into other projects. Just as Mozilla's XUL was clearly aped for Microsoft's XAML, open source contributes to the field as a whole, not just one particular project. There's no need to lick the pizza with open source.
Only the ever-trolling slashdot community could turn Google releasing and dog-fooding an open source project into a bad thing.
QT with LGPL could be used freely by google... maybe the problem is control... they could not control GTK and may have fear that QT could neither be controlled by then... Or is just another NIH attack!
Higuita