Linux Won't Get Aura UI Stack Until Google Chrome 33

[mrugiero]

Jul 24
The Cocoa UI frameworks on Mac provide a lot of rich, sometimes undocumented, behavior that we get for free. Being a true, native Cocoa application is the best thing on the Mac platform -- anything else will have Chrome falling into the uncanny valley. It would also be a lot of engineering cost for little to no benefit (or even a UX deficit).

That's never free. Using undocumented features is a time bomb for breakage. Anyway, I agree they could wait to bring Aura until such features cease to be available (and they are likely to, because undocumented also means there is no promise they will keep working).

[Daktyl198]

ok, so the huge advantage of the Aura UI will be ... ?

Full hardware acceleration for the entire Chrome interface. It also manages hardware acceleration for WebGL and Pepper-Flash.

[remenic]

I'm sensing a lot of enthusiasm, but I don't get why. The Chrome UI already flies. It's cool for them developers to be able to share the same UI code between Windows, Linux and ChromeOS, but does it benefit me, as a user, as well?

[remenic]

Full hardware acceleration for the entire Chrome interface. It also manages hardware acceleration for WebGL and Pepper-Flash.

The 'entire' Chrome interface? You mean the tabs? Chrome barely has any UI, everything is rendered inside the 'view' (or whatever you call it), and that seems to be hardware accelerated already. This probably benefits the developers more than the users. I doubt you'll see a notable difference, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

[Ferdinand]

Because I use both Firefox and Google chrome, both on the development branches (Nightly and Canary) and yet I prefer Firefox. Everything about it, in my eyes at least, is better. Google gets to play with cool things like this because their development team is so big, but there are fundamental things about Chrome that make me not want to use it.

If Firefox had more contributors (And if Servo would fucking hurry up) they would be able to play with cool things like this too, and that would make me very happy.

And what is Servo going to do that Gecko doesn't? Once Firefox gets a generational garbage collector it will be just as fast as Chrome.

[uid313]

Bloated

Sounds like Chrome is getting really, big, bloated, complex and high maintenance.

[bwat47]

That's never free. Using undocumented features is a time bomb for breakage. Anyway, I agree they could wait to bring Aura until such features cease to be available (and they are likely to, because undocumented also means there is no promise they will keep working).

He said "sometimes" undocumented, and I don't think they are explicitly depending on undocumented features. What he meant was that apple's cocoa framework already utilizes a lot of hardware acceleration features, so they get that 'for free', and that not all of cocoa's use of hardware acceleration is documented (but I'm sure a lot of it is). Since cocoa already utilizes a lot of hardware acceleration, then aura is simply not advantageous on osx.

On the linux side GTK doesn't really provide a whole lot of opengl hardware acceleration stuff, if any at all, same for win32 on the windows side, they pretty much just have basic 3d acceleration afaik. And they've already been working on aura for their chromeos, and now they are working on bringing aura over to windows and linux because it has the advantage of providing a lot more hardware acceleration than the native toolkits.

[smitty3268]

He said "sometimes" undocumented, and I don't think they are explicitly depending on undocumented features. What he meant was that apple's cocoa framework already utilizes a lot of hardware acceleration features, so they get that 'for free', and that not all of cocoa's use of hardware acceleration is documented (but I'm sure a lot of it is). Since cocoa already utilizes a lot of hardware acceleration, then aura is simply not advantageous on osx.

Maybe there's another quote about this somewhere, but the one quote here in these forums said nothing at all about performance or hardware acceleration in cocoa. He said that they want to provide a native look and feel on macs - which is a very common complaint about cross-platform apps there. Linux and Windows users are much more used to having applications that don't quite integrate as well into the native system, and you see such complaints much less often. It makes perfect sense that they'd consider using the native controls important on macs but not other platforms, and that has nothing to do with performance. It's all about the UX, as the quote itself said.

[hooluupog]

Sounds like Chrome is getting really, big, bloated, complex and high maintenance.

Not really. They had already removed 8.8M lines of webKit code from blink and began to address the cpu usage high,startup time slower than previous version problems which were reported from users. At present,chrome is gradually changing from webkit to blink and testing new aura ui interface etc, it will need enough time for these new features to become mature, lightweight and stable to use.

[doom_Oo7]

I'm sensing a lot of enthusiasm, but I don't get why. The Chrome UI already flies. It's cool for them developers to be able to share the same UI code between Windows, Linux and ChromeOS, but does it benefit me, as a user, as well?

On my computer (i7 with HD4000), IE 10 is waaaaaaaaaaaaaay faster than Chrome, scrolling, swiping, and zooming is just... instant. But I really don't like IE (and I only have Linux on it as of now anyway) so I'd like it to be fully accelerated