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Comment by norswap | Hacker News Reader

Why does the fact that GTK "looks non-native on Windows" disqualify it? If it's pretty enough for Linux, isn't also good enough for Windows? (Also my personal opinion is that it doesn't look too bad.)

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With GUIs, consistency is the primary concern followed by 'pretty'.

Non-native breaks consistency, rendering 'pretty' fairly meaningless.

Consistency is non-existent amongst apps. Even on OSX, for all their insistence on their Human Interfaces Guideline, the experience of using multiple apps is still a patchwork of styles. If your needs are fairly generic, you can assemble a fairly consistent set of apps, if you accept some that are crippled or plain lousy.

Not personal but I can't resist: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." (Emerson)

That's an absurd notion. Is chrome inconsistent because it doesn't look like a GUI toolkit?

Yes, and it annoys the hell out of me. Even Chromium's "GTK+" theme doesn't look right next to other GTK applications, where as Firefox does.

Looking at something like gsmartcontrol I can only spot the few icons being different than the shell32 ones, so it's still more consistent than most commercial software.

Why should anybody have to put up with non-standard UI and behaviour?

(Case in point: the very website's scrolling. Works great on desktop Firefox, not obviously distinguishable from any other website. On iOS... a sad joke, made at the user's expense.)

Except they already do, every day in multiple applications such as:

Spotify

Microsoft Office

NetFlix

Chrome

FireFox

...the list goes on. There is no such thing as a standard UI or behaviour at this point.

Any one that owns a mobile device already has to be used to a mixture of UIs every time they switch between devices or specific applications.

I couldn't actually read the entire article on iOS because of the weird scrolling on a large block of code that more than filled the entire screen.

Using the reader mode resolved the problem for me.

That's interesting. Are you on an iPhone? Reader mode is not enabled on that page for me.

Yes, and the reader mode was not available to me a first too. I believe I used the option to request the desktop page and then the icon appeared in the url bar.

Behavior I can understand, but there is nothing difficult to "put up with" about the look of gtk or qt in Windows.

GTK is also totally inaccessible to blind people, and possibly people with other disabilities as well, on Windows and Mac. I'm guessing you don't want to accidentally block people from using your application.

Do Gtk programs on Windows or Mac have the same, non native file selector dialog? I mostly use Linux (Ubuntu with i3wm) for coding and what annoys me most on daily basis are the file pickers on different applications. They are not only inconsistent, they are also all bad compared to Windows and Mac. It takes me far more time to select files than on the other platforms. Granted I use it mostly by far when webbrowsing as I use the commandline mostly but still at least a few times per day. I cannot check if Win or Mac Gtk apps use the platform picker or a Gtk one: if the latter, that would stop me from deploying software in Gtk on other platforms.

Gtk3 has native file chooser api (only for windows, no mac one yet).

I think it just depends on the nature of the software, if it's something I used every day I want as close an integration with the platform as possible. On the other hand if it was something I used once a month to manage my payroll for example I wouldn't worry too much.

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