I don’t know what’s the worst (or best) part: that HTML 5 is being used for this kind of gimmicks, or the fact that there’s people who are entertained by a gray cat who shits rainbows while flying- er, running across the universe with a pop tart glued to its back. Does that make sense? No. Does it need to make sense? No — this is the Internet, after all.

Feel free to click the links, but don’t blame me if your score in future IQ tests drops by a significant amount as a consequence.

Protip: nyan.cat works best with Google Chrome. Firefox 4 and Opera 11.10 miss the rainbow animation for some reason, on Linux at least. Not that I care, really.

Apparently the people at Mozilla finally decided to give their last Firefox release a try on a Linux/Gtk+ configuration other than Ubuntu 10.10’s default, or some diligent user reported to them how awful the new interface looks to the rest of the world who’s not using Windows. In any case, I seem to be receiving new builds through their beta channel, and a few hours ago I got my hands on Firefox 4.0.1 “beta” build 1, whatever that means.

The following picture should speak by itself: (Hint: look between the Firefox button and the toolbar.)

Before switching to Mozilla Firefox 4’s builds from the Nightly (Minefield) channel some time around mid-2010, I used to follow closely the blog of one of the Debian Iceweasel maintainers, from which I got goodness such as updates on the status of Iceweasel 3.6 for Debian Sid/Squeeze in Experimental, that I used for a while.

There’s a little piece of customization advice for Iceweasel/Firefox 4.0 users posted around January that I overlooked until now.

Turns out that this night after Firefox 4.0.1’s update, I decided that the “Firefox button” should match the Oxygen window decoration in style — because I’m that crazy. I took the ~/.mozilla/firefox/<session>/chrome/userChrome.css modifications from the blog post and played around with various combinations until I produced something marginally uniquer.

#appmenu-toolbar-button > .toolbarbutton-text {
  /* oxygen "carved" effect */
  text-shadow: 0px 1px 0px white;
  /* bold */
  font-weight: bold;
}

I am actually afraid of messing around with the many possibilities of XUL/CSS styling further, lest I spend the rest of the month producing my own full-fledged Firefox theme. The fact that I can handle CSS makes this all the more worrisome.

Web browsers break any established GUI design molds and this is no news for us. It was a necessity to create new controls (also known as widgets) in the ’90s when the Web was still a new, unknown thing and no common consensus on how users should interact with it existed. However, with time this practice has lost some of its technical grounds to become more of a profitable marketing strategy used by giants such as Mozilla and Microsoft to create distinct looks for their products.

Above we can see four browsers I personally consider major players in the GNU/Linux ecosystem in particular. From left to right, top to bottom in descending order of wheel reinvention and UI differentiation, we have: Opera 11 (???), Google Chrome 10 (GTK+), Mozilla Firefox 4.0 (XUL/GTK+) and Konqueror (KDE/Qt4) from KDE SC 4.4.

At the lower end, we have Konqueror, which has been designed to blend in with its parent application suite, the KDE desktop environment, so it uses a common visual design instead of inventing its own. At the top there’s Opera, a cross-platform browser that is not part of any specific suite and attempts to keep a consistent internal look between different operating systems, resulting in various reimplemented controls with different, custom functionality and a visual design unique to this software product.

In the middle we have Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, which have chosen to use the GTK+ toolkit to avoid reimplementing too much and concentrate on their actual business, that is, web browsing. But something’s horribly off about these two.

In Google Chrome’s case, we have a default, “Classic” theme that presents the user with the distinctive Chromium look and feel but keeps the standard GTK+ application design for modal dialogs. Embedded input controls in web pages such as checkboxes and unstyled command buttons appear to be rendered by a custom engine using Chrome’s own ideas of what a widget should look like. As Chrome belongs in the GTK+ territory like all of the GNOME desktop environment, this makes it really stand out as an individual application that behaves and looks like nothing native to GNOME or other GTK+-based environments. As an alternative, we can choose to use the “GTK+ theme” in the application’s preferences, which does nothing but switch the color scheme to respect the user’s desktop preferences a bit and fallback to GTK+’s icon paths for some (not all!) toolbar buttons.

This so-called “GTK+ theme” keeps the hideous low-contrast, Chrome-style scrollbar in the web page view area as well, basically mocking users who would hope for some desktop consistency and accessibility by choosing this option.

Mozilla Firefox provides an interesting case. Powered by the XULRunner framework, it aims to blend in with every one of its target platforms, using native Windows controls on Windows and GTK+ as a backend on Linux. However, someone didn’t get the memo with the main window’s tab bar, and instead of native GTK+ versions we get awful customized tabs that do not respect the user’s chosen GTK+ engine. It seems that in Firefox 4’s particular case the developers intended to achieve something closer to Opera in design, which worked in Windows, but didn’t get completed for Linux — probably due to time constraints and lack of volunteers to do the grunt work required in the coding area. Firefox 4 in Linux currently barely resembles the original mock-ups. (To their credit, those mock-ups showcase a really elegant — if somewhat unoriginal — design that is too unfortunately missing in the RTM builds.)

The current strategy appears to be all too profitable right now for these people to abandon it. We’ll probably just see more development in the GUI design department from web browser vendors than operating systems and desktop environments in the near future.