What does a native tab control on Windows look like, anyway?
I came across an article on EclipseZone today that got me to really wonder what a native tab on Windows should look like.
The article takes the tab control of Eclipse for an example.
Eclipse’s editor and view tabs have a gradient-based rendering with the colors drawn from the system primary and secondary colors.
…
, whereas Eclipse’s tabs will always stand out a bit from the surrounding native widgets.
This actually is a good point. I myself find the curved un-anti-aliased zig-zag looking tabs very funny to look at. But is it actually anything related to non-native-ness?
Think about all the tabbed applications you have used on Windows. Firefox, Internet Explorer, MS Word, Live Messenger, Google Talk, UltraEdit, Notepad++, … God! I can’t even find two of them which have the same looking tab controls! Isn’t that so obvious that it’s funny?
So the only thing wrong with Eclipse tabs may be the geekish looks. People don’t complain about those glossy IE7 tabs anyway…
