Originally Posted by daperl

On the technical side, they probably had to go a route like this because all rows in the standard GTK list widgets have to be the same height. And you nailed it: It's a speed thing. These are inexcusable, but known weaknesses of GTK. But I'm still not sure using the Gecko engine was necessary. Currently, I'm recreating some of the mediaplayer functionalty, and I'm using JSON config files to expose Pango markup that I then use in a kind of variable argument printf statement. Here's a clip:

Code:

"list-store" : [
      {"type":"pixbuf",
       "value":["pixbuf","thumbnail-uri",5]},
      {"type":"text",
       "value":["<span size=\"13200\">%s\n","title",3,
                 "<span foreground=\"#a0a0a0\">%s</span></span>","duration",4]}]

I'm sure I could recreate the Conversations UI using a similar technique combined with GtkTables instead of GtkTreeViews. I also combine those JSON config files with GtkBuilder files. This leaves plenty of room for customization and fast scrolling. And no HTML/CSS overkill.