When Google released its Chrome web browser not too long ago, it of course emphasised that the browser was an open source product. The browser contains 24 parts originating from 3rd parties, and to some surprise, one of those parts comes from one of Google's biggest enemies - Microsoft.
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Member since:2005-11-10
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-09-21
QT is anything-but "native".
That's funny because Opera only uses Qt on Linux, and there only in a very limited sense (mostly for stuff like printing). They actually have their own cross-platform toolkit called Swift if I remember correctly.
Member since:2006-11-19
Actually QT doesn't really use native widgets, it sort of does, but not really. Take a look through the source code, QT handles all of its own messaging and most if its own drawing. Essentially, each widget is connected to something like a peer, kind of like Java Swing. It is horribly complex.
Thats the reason why QT applications look absolutely God awful on the Mac and usually pretty bad on Windows (especially when compared with a true native WPF app on Windows or a Cocoa app on OSX).
And yes, I know that there is a beta version of QT that uses Cocoa, but I took a look at the source, and it does the exact same thing. It still most of its own drawing, it just draws to a Cocoa window instead of a Carbon window.
There is a reason why Apple ditched the bottom end of WebKit which was QT to a very light platform abstraction layer. There is a reason why most decent cross platform applications use the real native toolkit on each platform and not some library like QT. QT is really only truly native on Unix where QT and GTK ARE the toolkits.
Edited 2008-09-16 15:56 UTC
Member since:2005-11-09
Member since:2005-09-21
Cross platform native apps are hard. The code to handle it will be complex. You won't find any toolkit that can do what Qt can and is any simpler.
I don't use Qt on OS X, but on Windows they are pretty much indistinguishable. Especially considering every single windows app looks slightly different, so there really is no "native" windows look. Office, WMP, Explorer, Notepad, etc all look different, and those are from the same company. I haven't received any complaints about my Qt software on windows from any clients.
If you talk to normal users (not computer geeks) you will realize that no one gives a crap about what happens under the hood. However Qt does come with a lot more features, and since Chrome was supposed to be as lightweight as possible, I suspect that google went with something customized to keep down on overhead. It's more of a tech demo anyway, I don't think anyone seriously believes that Chrome will be a major browser.
Edited 2008-09-16 18:22 UTC
Member since:2007-09-08
Erm... WPF is not "native" by your definition either. WPF handles all of it's own drawing, and builds it's own messaging system on top of Windows's events. Just like Qt.
Windows.Forms does this as well. So do the UI libraries used internally by Microsoft's various applications. So does Internet Explorer. So does Firefox.
Member since:2006-03-23
Member since:
2005-07-06
QT uses native widgets in Windows and OSX so QT applications feel native in those environments.