blue sky: user interface

This bluesky item was expressed by jwz as "Destroy the FE" but lacking his succinctness, I will expand. The Navigator front end -- the interfaces, the menus, the dialog boxes, all the elements with which the user interacts -- should be expressed in completely generic abstractions, to the extent possible under the talents of programmers. That means no or very little code in the widget specs.

This will require beating around through all the FE code and finding logic that has crept into each platform individually, and verbally abusing it until it slinks back into the back end where it belongs. This can be done incrementally and there are nice wins all along the way, especially in the all-important universe of consistency.

The platform specific widgets that are actually used can be as pretty and platform-consistent as ever, and should be, and probably must be. Lay the browsers out the same, make them behave the same, but use the local widgets that the user is accustomed to seeing on their platform of choice (for whatever definition of "choice" applies to this crazy world...) In other words, don't make the Mac look like a bad Windows port; just force them to obey the same underlying logic and semantics.

A bunch of good stuff falls out of this effort. One of the nicest is that it becomes much easier to port the FE to a new platform. Every little bit to help the cross-platform effort not only makes Mozilla more useful today, but helps enable the world to switch between platforms more easily. You want users to have choices, right?