They already made their own thing for Chrome OS rather than use GTK/Gnome or Qt/KDE there.
I find it sad that they felt the need to make their own UI engine vs being able to contribute the changes they feel they need to an existing project. I'm sure Google engineers will tell you that they need to move faster than they could working within the community of GTK or Qt. Plus they don't want Chrome OS to suck because they can't get features merged by the community. They are valid points. The resulting fragmentation just sucks.
I assume Aura is open source. Given GTK's dropping adoption rate and a lot of people unhappy with the recent direction (design or lack of listening to current user base) of Gnome how long until someone writes a general purpose (not specific to Chrome OS) window manager/desktop environment on top of it?
I don't see that ever happening. Google does a lot of reinventing the wheel with their projects and most of it is not built in a way that is easily useable in downstream projects, and they probably won't accept patches anyways. Chromium OS, for example, could have been forked and used in a lot of cool ways but that hasn't happened yet and I doubt it will.
Huge GUI frameworks are overrated. They force you into their way of doing things. Then something newer and shinier supersedes them. If I had Chromium's developer power on my own projects I'd probably create custom GUI tools too.
Yeah, given that they have most of the code already done for drawing the browser screen(text, buttons, icons...), it probably makes sense for them to do so.
With Qt they will depend on a different company with different interest in mind.
I don't think they are "making their own thing". From the post, it seems like this is already what they use on the other platforms.
From what I gather, they are switching the Linux builds to use it as well so they don't have to duplicate development effort. I think that makes sense. It sounds like it might be rough and they seem to be aware of it; hence, the urgent call for testers.
