Recently in the Eclipse news group there’s been a lot of complaints about the new widget style that is now the default in mlilestone 8.

Many people are saying that the new widgets are bad because they are emulated in Java, and not real native widgets at all. This seems really odd to me in some ways, since the widgets have always been emulated in Java, it’s not like this is some new thing that’s been sprung upon us by the developers. But then in other ways I’m not surprised, because for all Eclipse’s touted native look and feel it’s always really been a Windows application.

Compare the new Eclipse widgets with those of a native Gnome application (GEdit in this case) and you’ll see at once that they look out of place. But this has always been the case. The real solution surely, is to use genuine native widgets here. The only reason the Windows crowd are screaming now is that Eclipse is becoming more cross platform in it’s look and feel, not less.