Alex seems to have stirred up some debate regarding visual refresh on Linux.  I wanted to talk a little about why its not as big of a priority right now, and longer-term thinking I’ve been doing about Linux.

First off, I think there’s a lot of “Mozilla doesn’t invest anything in Linux” comments which are pretty untrue, both currently and historically.  We’ve actually had more people in the project working on integration with Linux since I’ve been around than on Mac or Windows.  We’ve had really good native appearance  and drawing hooks for GTK2 (Qt doesn’t get much love, but we’ve asked/begged/pleaded for interest, and no one really seems to have it, including the distros that invest time into Firefox).  Where we use native look and feel, we are pretty solidly compatible.  The current trunk  adds native theme form widgets and other goodies, in no small part thanks to the work of Michael Ventnor.  There’s a lot of other work that involved significant time spent on Linux, including pango and cairo integration, and we’ve fixed a lot of things that required just as much effort on Linux as on other platforms, so I don’t think its anywhere close to zero, despite some people’s assertions to the contrary.

Second, we’re not going to share much between platforms other than icons between Linux and Windows.  We use -moz-appearance for most things, and that works really well, as I’ve noted.  There’s some comments suggesting that we’ll look like Vista on Linux, which is really not grounded in fact.  In the absence of separate work on a Linux iconset, we’ll likely share the Windows XP icons, since I think that color palette works better with Linux themes, but we’ll be able to do either/or between the two sets once we have them.

Third, designing a universal icon set specifically for all of the distros using GTK2 is a pretty hard challenge (I’d say nearly impossible), and I don’t think there’s any way we’ll really get it right, and there’s some painful discussions about who to target if we really try to target a specific reference distro.  A lot of the time it feels like the best we can do with the full icon set is broken clock correctness (actually right a small percentage of the time).  We could design a set of icons for one distro’s defaults, but that would look bad on other distros.  Ubuntu has a firefox-themes-ubuntu which adds three themes designed to integrate with their distinctive default look and feel.  We couldn’t use those themes though, and anything we ship is probably not going to look right on their end.

I’ve wanted to use stock icons as the base for the theme, but there’s definitely gaps where we don’t have obvious icons, and that’s something we never quite figured out when we were experimenting with the Fedora guys a couple of years back (that’s when we added the stock icons to the buttons/dialogs).  Its worth looking at again now that we’re raising the bar on Linux library reqs, but there’s still some scary issues about how to fill the gap where stock icons don’t exist for the function you want to expose, without the icon looking totally broken and wrong.

Finally, Stephen Garrity posted about creating a Tango -based theme for Firefox 3 on the newsgroups some months back.  There wasn’t a lot of initial interest/activity there, but if you’re interested in helping improve Firefox 3 on Linux, at least for some subset of distros, please  check out bug 381206.  We’re not saying we don’t want a better icon set on Linux as well, but no one has a clear vision of what the right thing to do is.  Hopefully some people can jump in and start making progress there.