Code 'n Stuff

Update 01 Dec 2010: People who write GTK+ themes may want to go read the documentation for telling Google Chrome which colors to use to draw the frame.

Update 08 Dec 2009: Holy cow this page has a lot of Googlejuice! These screenshots don’t look anything like how the feature turned out. You may want to look at the screenshots in Google Chrome for Linux Beta instead.

I don’t usually talk about Chromium, but I have something really cool I want to share:

Earlier today I committed the first of several patches to the Chromium tree that address Bug #13967, “theme base colors should be picked from system colors.” We’ve gotten a lot of requests to try to visually match Linux user’s GTK themes. A good option to have, as much as I might like the default blue theme.

As of r19868, there is now a “GTK Theme” button on the Personal Stuff tab of the Option dialog. Clicking it will switch to GTK theme mode, while “Reset to default theme” will switch you back.

Here’s Chromium running with the “Clearlooks” theme and system title bars and borders:

Here’s Chromium running with the Ubuntu Human theme and using the skyline:

This is obviously not a polished final work. Just from the screenshots above, I can count four big graphical problems, and Chromium’s interpretation of dark themes like HighContrastInverse can only be described as unusable. There are the ongoing problems with 32-bit/64-bit *.so libraries (this time: theme engines). The fonts are wrong. There’s a lot of work to be done before this is acceptable for day to day use.

But I’m excited because some progress is being made.