This is stupid. the motif look on linux is great. like even the buttons chane color. the new widgets suck.

I like the new widgets. I think that everything that appears inside the browser should be platform independant. Chris and I have talked about this before, and we both think that's one of the selling points for java, is that wherever you look at it from, it looks the same. While some of the fine details of the way they look need to be changed IMO, I think the general idea is the right one.

The fact that forms will be the same size and behave the same across different platforms is a *huge* win for developers.

Lookin' good! And platform-agnostic, to boot. I'll vote with the "Yeas" on this one.

If the new widgets are platform independent, they'll most likely become much slower than native widgets.

Loading a gif image for each state of the widget slows also down, as native widgets are using pixel plotting.

They're not bad, but entirely all that great either... A few more colors and steering away from the color scheme used since, forever, might be nice...

Gray and blue gets on you sometimes.

They're not bad, but entirely all that great either... A few more colors and steering away from the color scheme used since, forever, might be nice...

Gray and blue gets on you sometimes. I wouldn't suppose Chrome would be extening out this far..?

Isn't one of the things with NGLayout the ability to apply styles to form elements? I like platform independent widgets, but I don't like "hard coding" them look a certain way. The power to specifiy fonts, colors, styles, line widths, sizes, etc. should be in the hands of web designers.

shades of Java Metal - i like that look. then again, it can only improve on the ugg-ly Motif, i suppose...

except maybe the down-triangle button on the combo box is a bit large in proportion to the text in the box, but then again that image is a rough first draft, and combo boxes seem hard to do right - most widget sets do them different, apparently.

the backdraw of platform independence here is of course that you might break UI uniformity on any given platform (or all of them), which a purist would consider a cardinal sin. but then, the web might be argued to be a "platform" unto itself, so it's a holy war right there.

speed should be an issue, of course, but aren't we used to waiting on the web already? if the underlying drawing layers are done right, these widgets shouldn't be all that slow.

default colour scheme *should* be conservative, for the same reason you don't set a 300-page novel in Zapf Dingbats. content, not flashy distracting presentation! making them honour the colour scheme used on the web page might work well, though.

it'll be interesting to see this in usable practice. keep up the good work, everybody.

Wiggo- Having implemented a cross-platform look and feel, I can tell you that they won't do it through .gifs, which would limit the ability to easiy customize them (resize, recolor, change text,etc) and would be slower. They'll be pixel-plotted, too, just like they are in Java Swing. And they'll be indistiguishable from native platform speeds.

Prehaps I'm being silly because, maybe you're already doing it, but what I'd like to see a design that's themeable -- that is, the API is separable from the implementation, as is (Java's) Swing 1.1 and (Gnome's) GTK 1.1.

This will, I think, clarify the design, and also, if somebody doesn't like the look of the default widgets, they can go get a different set.

I like it. It fixes all my gripes with the original concept image :-) well done.

Where can I find the arguments in favour of one cross-platform widget look'n'feel? I can see the arguments for a consistent API, but native widgets will surely be faster (unless native widgets can't do what's needed), and changing the look'n'feel from the hosting OS is inconsistent and confusing to users. And I can't see it being much of a boon to web developers, because all their advantages disappear when their pages are viewed on other browsers. However, I'm sure this has already been discussed to death - can someone summarise the arguments?

I have to say, I'll be glad of the new drop-down list widget. Under Solaris, long lists invariably gravitated towards the right hand side of the page, making it difficult to select the correct column.

That said, the new icons are not entirely to my taste, but that's probably just a problem of getting used to a new "theme". It'll help cross-platform interoperability, however.

I'm impressed: nice clean looking designs. However, I do have one concern: I don't like the idea of all of the gizmoss having a `rollover' change in appearance. There are two main reasons why I don't like it:

* I feel that it reduces the intuitiveness of the interface: it is not immediately apparent what is clickable toolbar button and what is simply decoration.

* I find the flickering annoying when I move the mouse about.

Is the plan to make this stuff pluggable, ie will it be possible to use the platform's native widgets as an alternative? I don't like the idea of my machine having to run two completely parallel widget libraries: it smells of bloat to me. I'd prefer to have a thin layer leveraging the widgets I already have installed. For the Unix builds, perhaps it would be better to have a thin GTK layer and a GTK theme using these designs...?

Another idea that has just occurred to me: is there any particular reason why it would not be possible to use the Swing widget designs? It seems to me that the motivation behind those tools is very similar to the goals of the Mozilla interface team.

I like it... it'll be nice to be able top plot out pages and know *exactly* how they'll look across multiple platforms. Great work!

As a minor aside, though, would it be at all possible to move the scroll arrows "together" in applicable form widgets (cf. MacOS 8.5, NeXTStep/OPENSTEP, et al.)?

Looks good, not great though. Functional but very dull. As some earlier posters have suggested, making the widget-set pluggable would be very interesting.

Also, in the "Scroll List/onMouseOver", you've got the current selection UNDERLINED. This is a loss. Underlines obscure descenders, and are very hard to find in a cluttered list. Dotted-boxing of the current selection, or something to make it stand out better would be nice.

Note that one reason to avoid a given platform's widgets is you can probably support scaling more easily. Not everyone has perfect vision.

I'd vote for an additional dark line on the right side of the scroll bar "thumb", and perhaps some of the other "3-D" edges could be thicker, but otherwise it's not bad. I'm not sure that I like having a combo box at all though -- anyone read mackido on this?

I'm not so sure I like this. What's important is that pages feel the same across all pages; layout is the same, controls are in the same place, and so on. The controls, for the sake of usabilitry, should take on the appearance of the rest of the operating system's controls.

This can still be done in a more-or-less platform-neutral manner, by abstracting the controls API. Put them into a platform-dependant library, which converts these controls into native calls for the system's controls. Make a scrollbar look like a Mac scrollbar on Macs, a Windoze scrollbar on Windows, a GTK scrollbar when GTK is used, and so on. Don't bloat it with a completely new widget set.

This said, I do like the new appearance of toolbar buttons.

Being a motif and OpenGL programmer(not an expert but wears glasses) I would like to customize the colours(some colours induce a strain on my eyes, cool colours ok ), particularly size of widgets(eye starin due to long coding hours). Can we not have a resource file irrespective of platform like .WWWrc or .browzerrc(like .Xdefaults or .kshrc) where we can tell any browser our choices for web objects(interface widgets, menus, etc) attributes? Overhead for browsers is certain.

Being a motif and OpenGL programmer(not an expert but wears glasses) I would like to customize the colours(some colours induce a strain on my eyes, cool colours ok ), particularly size of widgets(eye starin due to long coding hours). Can we not have a resource file irrespective of platform like .WWWrc or .browzerrc(like .Xdefaults or .kshrc) where we can tell any browser our choices for web objects(interface widgets, menus, etc) attributes? Overhead for browsers is certain.

Woooo those widgets are way cool. If only the rest of what i did could look that nice. :)

In addition to being platform neutral, I think that the new widgets should be language/culture neutral too.

For example the tick (in tickbox) means (I think) 'ok' or 'yes' in anglo-american countries, but in others it's a 'no' or 'incorrect' and the '%' sign is used as 'ok'.

In any case, I think that altho the widgets' looks are propably best being platform neutral, their control-idioms should be the same as the underlying platform's (same hotkeys, etc). e.g. in X you can use the middle button for paste, unlike in mac or windows. In windowsyou can use shift-insert)

Please while designing widget-looks, give a thought about persons with eye glasses and not every one does have fancy hitech display. A default look of widgets for all platforms, can be set; but colours and sizes(like of scroll bar) should be customizable locally by the users, with a "browser resource file".

Only one word to describe the new widgets. SWEET! Well done.

this is much better than the first version

IMHO:

It is very important that the widgets look the same on all platforms as well as behaving exactly the same; assuming that the look and behavior of the widgets isn't totally bizzaro or in some other way retarded.

It is also very important that they be successfully balanced between being completely flat and boring and being wildly distractive and clumsy.

From the example sheet, it looks like these goals have been achieved. I can't wait to see them in action.

It would have been nice if you'd consulted with a human interface expert. Jakob Nielsen or Bruce Tog would probably have taught you a thing or two...

There's more to making a good interface than having a bright idea. Backing the idea up with hardcore research is key. Nielsen, Tog and many others have done that.

(That said, I'm all for standards, even if they are mal-designed... it's gotta be better than what we have now!)

The widgets look really cool, but they don't conform to the user-interface the user already knows: the native user-interface.

That's a big disadvantage. Users are used to a certain user-interface. When a button doesn't look like a button (like in the new widgets), they get confused.

Besides that, I miss the text-input box "<textarea>". Is this being reprogrammed? If 'yes', then undoubtly some inconsistencies will appear. Bad for the user. If 'no', the scrollbars of the box would look different from the other widgets. Bad too.

So, although they look great, I think it's a bad idea.

The new widgets look good... I have always had a problem with the Motif widgets under Unix and to me it makes sense to unify all the Mozilla version to make web pages display more consistently across platforms.

BUT!

I don't think I can stress how important it is to allow people to customise these widgets! You really MUST allow them to be themable, either using the native platform's theming system, or having a Mozilla theming system. It shouldn't be too hard if they're all bitmap files of some kind and then you'll make everyone happy.

Keep up the fantastic work guys!

This is one big reason I don't use IE on my Mac. They bypass the system widgets and use their own. I dont know why, but I dont like that. It seems like it would be more stable if they just used the system widgets...

Other people have mentioned the TEXTAREA widget's notable absence. I'd *hate* to lose the standard Motif (or Emacs, whichever way you want to put it) keystrokes. Likewise, I guess the Windows bods (those who haven't resorted completely to pointy-clicky) would miss their CUA bindings.

I concur with whoever it was that said that underlining wasn't a good way of indicating a selection -- in fact, on my first look at the widgets I didn't notice it at all....

I've got to agree with the people here that are stressing making everything themeable. It can be a very cool thing to be able to tailor the look of your entire desktop around a certain theme, and then when you have the occasional application that breaks the design it ruins the whole mood. :)

Hi: Thanks for the great feedback here and in the mozilla newsgroups. In creating this second design we have factored in many of your ideas/concerns. Let me respond to some issues briefly: - the dull look: we have to be dull/neutral for these designs in order to enable HTML4 attributes to work. E.g. we can cannot have large bevels, colorful backgrounds etc or GIF elements to describe the button appearance in order to provide the flexibility HTML4/CSS requires. - Mouseover type design vs other approaches: you may have already read why we think this type of design will be useful in awebpage context. However we are open to other suggestions, and part of the process will be to select 2-3 final design candidates and run them by usability testing to ensure our quality requirements are met. - Finally: this is an open process: If you have ideas, participate! To the best of our abilities we will try to incorporate ideas and suggestions/concerns from you before making final choices. We'll also keep you up to date on the progress, as always. German

>If the new widgets are platform >independent, they'll most likely >become much slower than native >widgets.

This is untrue on the Windows platform because you have to create a window handle for each widget you want to display (this uses HUGE amounts of memory and slows down the redraws because the system has to handle many regions).

On the X plateform you could keep the same speed as standard widgets if you describe them in terms of boxes and lines rather than in terms of pixels.

In fact, IE4 for windows uses the very same technique to be able to display forms at a reasonable speed (IE4 draw his own widgets) - they call this "windowless controls".

BTW, this a very good idea because this will simplify the ports of Mozilla, particulaly on plateforms that do not have any widgets (webTVs, webTerminals, ...).

>If the new widgets are platform >independent, they'll most likely >become much slower than native >widgets.

This is untrue on the Windows platform because you have to create a window handle for each widget you want to display (this uses HUGE amounts of memory and slows down the redraws because the system has to handle many regions).

On the X plateform you could keep the same speed as standard widgets if you describe them in terms of boxes and lines rather than in terms of pixels.

In fact, IE4 for windows uses the very same technique to be able to display forms at a reasonable speed (IE4 draw his own widgets) - they call this "windowless controls".

BTW, this a very good idea because this will simplify the ports of Mozilla, particulaly on plateforms that do not have any widgets (webTVs, webTerminals, ...).

Thanks for doing this valuable work.

The look is fine with me. But there's another issue that I can't emphasize enough:

PLEASE DON'T SCREW UP THE FEEL! I can't tell you how many applications I've seen with a glorious-looking, totally themable super-great interface that is COMPLETELY KEYBOARD HOSTILE and totally unusable in a production data-entry environment where people expect to be able to fill in a form entirely without moving their hands off the keyboard.

If TAB and SHIFT-TAB don't work properly, it's not suitable for real work. In my not-so-humble opinion.

Thanks again for doing the work on this.

Well, Its better then the Windows look, thats for sure. But I still like motif better. can you make the windows browser to look like motif?

Thank you, anything to avoid anything even slightly Motiff-like is great. The only complaint I would have is the little arrow appearing on default buttons. I don't like that. Other than that, I think it's good to give users a little variety.. Certainly in Windows where everything really is the same.

Although I strongly disagree with using widgets that do not look like the underlying platform, the look of the widgets is certainly NOT the most important issue. Platform feel is essential.

Widgets that don't work like widgets everywhere else in the OS are BAD!

I use the Windows95 right-click menu on text fields/textareas all the time for Copy and Paste and sometimes Undo. This keeps my hand on the mouse and is very convenient. Similar arguments can be made for standard Windows keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+C, Ctrl+v, etc. The problem with recreating these widgets is that you're likely to miss some common platform behavior. For example, scroll bars in Windows scroll a page when you click on the bar and not the scrollthumb. In other OSes it scrolls to the relative point in the region. I won't argue which is best, but that you should match the rest of the OS. If it doesn't it leads to user frustration.

As others noted, the textarea is missing. This is an important form element. The combobox sample doesn't show what a long combobox would look like if it needs scrollbars. Would the scrollbars be the same style as the scroll list?

I personally despise the "Magic Wand" technique that some web pages have gone to (particularly IE's hover color). In this technique, it is impossible to tell what items are links without waving the pointer around waiting for things to highlight/rollover. You've avoided this problem to some extent by showing some prominence to buttons at all times, but why should buttons need to change at all? I find it disconcerting if the page "ripples" when you move your mouse across it. This can lead to distraction when the user asks "what changed just then?" and goes back to see. Users think it looks cool, but the usability studies seem to indicate that it actually decreases productivity.

While I'm on it, it seems that whatever style is used for widgets in forms, should also be used for the toolbars/controls of the browser. Why reinvent buttons several times?

Looks good. I don't like the underline on the drop down list as I missed it the first time around.

I think the advantages here do out way the disadvantages.

Using these widgets for the page content is a good idea, but not for the rest of the Mozilla UI (unless the platform your porting to has no GUI) that should use the platforms standard UI.

Also have a default set of key controls for the new GUI and use that default if the platform your on doesn't have a GUI, but on platforms like UNIX, Windows, Mac use their standard key board handling. I've never found slightly different looking up arrows and down arrows or buttons very confusing, but having your text box handle the key board in differnt ways can be confusing. My sister who is a novice user thought I was running windows when she was using netscape under Linux and it uses a different GUI.

I also think that it will make form placement and page design a lot easier since the widgets will always take up the same amount of space regardless of the platform. The feature of color blending widgets is also nice, but you should be able to turn it off. And it should be based on a standard not something unique to Mozilla. Maybe using the body fg and bg colors.

I don't like the scroll list design. The underlined element looks like a link.

Ugh. They look like WinWidgets.

consistent widgets may be great for cross OS consistency but the one thing that bugs web developers the most is having to tailor every page to work around inconsistencies between netscape and other browsers...and now you're trying to add another thing to piss them off.

I happen to think that correct visual interpretation of a widget should NOT depend on the 3D highlighting. The human brain takes longer to process the 3D effects into shapes than it does to distinguish shapes shown in different colours. This is a major problem with the Motif look, in my opinion, although this widget set does at least look less butt-ugly than that. Other than that, I'm all for it. Anything that helps clueless web designers make pages that look the same on my machine as they look on theirs is a good thing (well, ALMOST anything :-). And as to the argument that this increases browser incompatibilities, in my option, it reduces it. Rather than treating Netscape as three platforms wrt. form layout, it can now be treated as one.

Everyone seems to have their pet widget-sets, and I see people rag on Windows widgets and claim they like motif better...

What!? Motif is fat lacks some of the functionality of Windows widgets that I really like. And before you start, I am writing this in Linux. Combo-boxes in motif are awful. They pop out to the side when they are too large to fit in one column. They start filling up the whole screen. I think that is acceptable behavior for menus because they are organized somewhat like a directory structure, but with a combo-box it is just ugly.

My second biggest gripe is that I can't give a combo-box focus and then use the keyboard to scroll through the items in the list.

I realize that there are good and bad points to both ways of doing things, but as a developer, I tend to see Netscape as a platform itself. People will figure it out with relative ease. I was just viewing something that I wrote while in Windows and it is terrible with motif. The whole damn thing is bigger than it should be. If I choose to run at 1280x1024 or 1600x1200 I WANT my widgets to be small. I am in 1280x1024 right now and all of my widgets seem like they should be in 640x480(except for the little-ass scroll bars). The ability to write one and have it look the same accross platforms is a major plus. IE already uses its own widgets, so maybe MS will extend them so they will work much like the new set in Netscape. I am all for choice though, so I definitely say they should be customizable. That way if you want to make them look like native widgets to everyone you can do so with JavaScript.

There is no standard widget set in X. Or at least that is how it seems. I can open five random X apps and see five different sets of widgets. So if you run a Unix variant, why do you even care?

I don't have enough experience on a Mac to say anything about their widgets, so I won't. I just didn't want to seem like I think only two platforms exist.

I think they look pretty good. My only complaint is that with onMouseDown in the popdown and combo boxes, the text column and down-trangle column aren't separated. They look a little wierd the way they are. I think there shold be a 1-pixel black line between them.

Everyone seems to have their pet widget-sets, and I see people rag on Windows widgets and claim they like motif better...

What!? Motif is fat lacks some of the functionality of Windows widgets that I really like. And before you start, I am writing this in Linux. Combo-boxes in motif are awful. They pop out to the side when they are too large to fit in one column. They start filling up the whole screen. I think that is acceptable behavior for menus because they are organized somewhat like a directory structure, but with a combo-box it is just ugly.

My second biggest gripe is that I can't give a combo-box focus and then use the keyboard to scroll through the items in the list.

I realize that there are good and bad points to both ways of doing things, but as a developer, I tend to see Netscape as a platform itself. People will figure it out with relative ease. I was just viewing something that I wrote while in Windows and it is terrible with motif. The whole damn thing is bigger than it should be. If I choose to run at 1280x1024 or 1600x1200 I WANT my widgets to be small. I am in 1280x1024 right now and all of my widgets seem like they should be in 640x480(except for the little-ass scroll bars). The ability to write one and have it look the same accross platforms is a major plus. IE already uses its own widgets, so maybe MS will extend them so they will work much like the new set in Netscape. I am all for choice though, so I definitely say they should be customizable. That way if you want to make them look like native widgets to everyone you can do so with JavaScript.

There is no standard widget set in X. Or at least that is how it seems. I can open five random X apps and see five different sets of widgets. So if you run a Unix variant, why do you even care?

I don't have enough experience on a Mac to say anything about their widgets, so I won't. I just didn't want to seem like I think only two platforms exist.

I forgot this in my previous post, but also I think that it's a bad idea to let the web designer (speaking as one myself) change the look of the widgets, especially those outside of the page itself (e.g., the back button, the menus, etc.). The whole point is to have a consistent interface. If people want an immersive experience where they're led entirely by the web designer, they'll turn off all the toolbars. It would be very confusing, as a user, to have your screen change colors every minute, and not have control over it.

Since Mozilla is not the only navigator on the market, I think that a platform independent widget is not that important for look and feel. And if the main advantage is the ease of porting it to other platforms, then why not put an abstraction layer which would allow to use any toolkit without much trouble ?

Why can't these be loaded like fonts or something are treated. A web page can define it's own url for where it's widgets are set or pick a pre-defined set. AND the user can over-ride to any set they want or those pre-defined by the OS. The designer always should get to pick how something looks EXCEPT when the user wants to change it.

Okay, I have to feelings on this issue.

Pro-Standard Widgits.

One fear of webpage designers is the size and shape of widgits. A different sized widgit, could make some page designs look ugly, such as the Troop 89 WebPage's (http://welcome.to/bsa89) Navigation javascript pull-down, under Motif. Try it with a Unix-based version of Navigator 4.x, and it is ugly. This is due to the different sized widgit of motif, compared to the standard size of Mac and Window's widgits.

Anti-Standard Widgits.

Standarization is not always a good thing. People use different platforms, and different "themes" on the platforms. Some Mac people could be upset if the widgits look "Windows-like", but then again, some PC people could be offended if you used Mac-Like widgits. Also, if you build Mozilla for Unix-based OS's, against GTK+, the GTK+ widgets are the same size as standard PC/Mac widgits. Finnally, alot of people use themes, and would like there browser to take advantage of those widgits, whether or not it's the browser or if it's the webpage.

If you could some how make the rendering engine support the native widgits, ie. GTK+ widgits for Unix-based OS's, Mac OS Themes, and Windows Color Schemes, that would be great. However that might require a lot of extra codeing and a pain in the ***.

Okay - they look fine to me, but the one thing I *really* want to know is - what does the radio button look like on a non-grey background? In the Nav 4 and older series, there's an example of bad coding in that the corners around the radio button are still grey - they aren't transparent!

You need to show us these things on colour backgrounds so we know what it's going to *really* look like. Even white would do. I've not seen a site with a grey background for a VERY long time... the standard boring site background colour is now white. :)

Yes, please, show on other backgrounds. And yes, the same widgets for all platforms. That's great and exactly what Microsoft is doing with it's browser, so that is going in the right direction. The way things go will have two widgets for all platforms, one IE's and the other Mozilla/Netscape. And yes, give the designers the posibility to change the colors of the widgets, so they comform to palettes they are using on their page. Greaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat job!!! And by the way, to read something good about user interface design get Alan Cooper's 'About Face'

And I forgot, the widgets in the app should conform to the platform the app is running, not to these widgets. And also the keyboard control of these widgets should be selectable and even customizable. I think that's all.

And something else I forgot. Someone suggested that the arrows in the scroll bar be together. That's great, but I always wondered where to put them. All the way up or all the way down? Well, how about this, change the arrow by a two way kind of nice looking arrow. Put one on top and one on the bottom. When you click on them with the left mouse button the scroll bar goes up, when you right click on any of them the scroll bar goes down... but then what happens when you click with any button on the free space not being occupied at the moment by the scroll bar? Well, the scroll bar shoul get closer to the mouse. If any one is able to implement and try, do before comenting.

And one final thing, though it may not belong here... how about soft scroll a là IE... though on the app, not on the widgets.

And the final, final one, would you please put the text area example... and refresh these more often. It's the 18th and hasn't changed since the 4th... but do that at your discretion ;)