why is FM's UI so weird and buggy?

[Robert Lauriston]

Thinking about the bizarre UI bugs Rick Quatro reported today, I'm
wondering how the product got to this sad state.

FM started out on Unix, and a lot of dialogs seem like they haven't
changed since then, or at least not since the original Mac and Windows
ports in 1990 and 1992. But that stuff was pretty much rock-solid up
through FM8.

My impression is that the UI changes Adobe introduced in FM9 were made
using the Adobe OS Widget Library (OWL), which is designed to provide
a consistent UI for the Mac and Windows versions of Adobe's products.

Unlike most of those products, FM has no Mac version. If Adobe's QA is
done primarily on Macs, that could explain why the product has been
getting buggier and weirder with each release. All the cross-platform
apps could benefit from a shared library of tools, while FrameMaker
and any other Windows-only apps would need additional work that the
budget might not allow.