I think you are missing a lot.
I realize this is an old article, but I just happened to run across it.
Enterprising hackers have solved your problem:
http://osnovice.blogspot.com/2007/05/firefox-controls-are-ugly.html
Ew, I canāt imagine choosing to use IE over Firefox. Yeah, I use Windows XP. I canāt say that the native UI thing bothers me. I think it has to do with my use of GNU/Linux on every other computer I own, so Iām used to those interfaces, and my use of non-Microsoft software for pretty much every other program besides the browser as well. Firefox starts to fit in pretty well when youāre using free software for everything else on Windows, too: Pidgin for IM, X-Chat for IRC, OpenOffice for word processing, Azureus for torrents, Tor for anonymization, GIMP for photo editing, etc. Frankly, IE looks a lot more out of place to me than Firefox does just because of everything else I use, even under Windows XP.
firefox degrades the text you read, and the graphics you view, to make for faster viewing, its hard to read a regular text page. You shouldnāt have to degrade something to make it better. This speeds up your viewing, but it reduceās the appearance of a normally neat viewable pageā¦
I perfer a browser that i can see easilyā¦
When I first read your article I thought you were just another whiney mac user. Then I started using the safari 3 beta for windows. While the rendering is really fast and its a lot lighter than FF (though FF is still the best for web development), the mac widgets and totally different look and feel are very hard to get past. I had the same issue with using GAIM/pidgin in windows until gtk started using native windows widgets by default.
I think you are very much right. Until an application visually fits into a system we, the users, just donāt like it. Regardless of any technical merits it may have.
Also the best thing that ever happened to java ui is the jgoodies windows look and feel.
2 bob:
I had the same issue with using GAIM/pidgin in windows until gtk started using native windows widgets by default.
Actually, GTK+ version 2 doesnāt use native Windows widgets (which are implemented in modules user32.dll and comctl32.dll), as Bill King already mentioned. Instead, GTK+ has theme engine called āMS-Windows Engineā (aka GTK-Wimp, stands for āWindows impersonatorā). This theme engine uses Windows Visual Styles API (aka UxTheme API, implemented in module uxtheme.dll), if it is available (it is available in Windows XP and later operating systems), to paint GTK+ widgets. This allows GTK+ widgets to look like native Windows widgets.
Iām sure that what is needed here are simply more standards. If someone came up with a set of XML standards or whatnot which defined the themes of buttons, fonts, and other such things, it seems to me the problem would be solved. The window itself matches the theme of the desktop, so why canāt programs simply specify that they want to use the āstandard desktopās themeā and subject themself to that theme that the user chooses? Here Iām also hinting that I believe the silly button graphics and such should also be a theme that is changable, but that part of it is for the OS developers to allow (which is one reason why I like sticking to Linux). Back on topic though, if someone did come out with a standard, itād help to make writing apps that looked and felt native to any desktop environment non-trivial. I donāt know if the solution is WXWidgets, that may help for now, but the long term solution seems to me to be one of untangling any platform-specific code from the buttons and such, and have a standard to allow all of the graphics to be determined by the DE, the way it should have been a long, long time ago in the first place. The programmers whoāve decided to make their own GUI instead of putting the API in place to allow the user to have the GUI they wanted to go along with their DE need a good chastizing. 
When two applications with rough feature parity compete, the application with the native UI will win. Every time. If you truly want to win the hearts and minds of your users, you go to the metal and take full advantage of the native UI.
Iām not even sure the native application has to be at parity with a competitor to win. I think the lack of tabs in Safari is a big detriment.
I also agree with Jeffās comments about the Java UI. UGGG-LYYYYYY. And SLOW. Never met a Java app I didnāt hate.estetik estetik estetik
WTF? You write a supposed programming blog and use FUCKING IE 7?
i dont agree with you, i mean yes sometimes/mostly non-native UI sucks but sometimes its very cool, take a look for example at Microsoft Max (http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=156065, its dead now but you can find some photos of it on the web)
It seems really silly (and, yes, shallow) to pick a browser based on the aesthetics of the the buttons. The plugins available for Firefox make my browsing at least twice as productive as my IE browsing - itās like the switch from dialup to cable.
We should strive for aesthetic excellence in what we build, but pick the applications we use for more than style.
Would you really hire Marilyn Monroe to be your executive assistant? (get the chuckling out the the way here)
Really?
I personally use safari, but keep camino for those odd ball firefox/camino only websites.
i do enjoy the native UI feel, and hate Java apps invading my osx
-clay
AdBlock Plus is not a productivity addin. If thatās the best Firefox plugin you use, I understand how youād prefer IE7.
I just did your mousewheel test and Firefox was durn speedy in scrolling to the top. I only have 18 tabs open - normally I have between 40 and 60 open, but I just cleared some tabs to Scrapbook.
Iām going to try one more crack at this web productivity addon thing. Some game changer addons Iām using include Scrapbook, SessionSaver, SearchKeys, DownloadThemAll, ButMeNot, and Colorzilla. The reason I call these out (Iām using a lot more addons) is that they illustrate the idea of using a browser in a fundamentally different way. These things go beyond improving loading time and reducing annoyances to changing the way I work. Scrapbook (set up with FolderShare) allows me to save any page and have it available offline on any of my computers while keeping the original URL and allowing me to make notes at any level. Thatās a huge difference from a Favorites menu - I donāt even bother with Favorites anymore, itās like talking about better cassette sorting methods when youāve got an MP3 player.
And thatās just one extension out of a dozen that I use.
So Iām going to pick IE7 over that because it seems to āfits inā better with Vista? Crazy talk.
Iām sorry to say it Jeff but I donāt think youāre in good company, I think youāre in a tiny minority of people who actually care. Safari, like IE, is the most popular because itās the default. Nothing more, nothing less.
I for one do not and will not lament some appsā lack of ānativeā look in Vista, which to me often looks like a cheesy photoshop job, as if some geek got a little trigger-happy on the shadows and glows. And as for the ālegacyā main menu, Internet Explorer isnāt a complicated enough program to need ribbon-esque functionality (as compared with MS Office, which is considerably more confusing even to many experienced users).
Iām on the fence when it comes to the web itself; that FF-Mac screenshot does look butt-ugly, and yet something bothers me about the Safari shot too. It just doesnāt look like Google. Those buttons are not Googleās styleā¦ they donāt seem to fit. I donāt know, maybe Iām just not used to seeing it like that, since it looks the same in both IE6 and Firefox (Windows).
Itās crazy that itās been 9 years since you posted this. So long ago and yet still so far away from being the clear and understood best practice for designers and developers.
FYI, some mac users (cough, cough) preferred Firefox over Safari even back then, and now prefer Chrome over either, but still hate it when native widget has been messed with on a specific site, breaking the general look-and-feel from other sites. My biggest pet peeve is the scroll bar. Dude, I donāt care if your new corporate branding is all red and black, please donāt make my scrollbar black-on-red, it looks like sh*t and makes it harder to scroll your actual content.
Heads up, sir. Someone on SO with good intentions name-dropped you and this post on why they wanted to nest a button inside a link (to ensure a ānative buttonā look for the link). Maybe this would be a good jumping off point for an article on semantic document/data layer versus presentation or the like. (Also, I was pretty pleased with my pop culture reference to the old Easy Spirit shoe jingle).
This is spam, but I originally misinterpreted as just a wall-of-garbage style spam, but then it occurred to me to try changing #1076; to д , and so forth, and run it through an xml entity decoder. Sure enough, the above decoded as:
Ń Š“ŃŠ¼Š°Ń Š² 2012 Š³Š¾Š“Ń ŃŠ±Š¾ŃŠ½Š°Ń ŃŠ¾ŃŃŠøŠø ŠæŠ¾ ŃŃŃŠ±Š¾Š»Ń Š²ŃŠµŃ ŠæŠ¾ŃŠ²ŠµŃ ŃŠ¾ŃŃŠøŠø
which Google Translate detected as Russian for:
I think in 2012 the Russian national football team of Russia will tear
So again, spam. But a nice geeky puzzle, too, with the result being āthis is drivel spam, not abusive spamā
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