31 ms·

If you have a hard requirement to use a thoroughly obsolete GUI toolkit, you can for now fairly easily compile your own copy of Firefox for GTK2; it takes aroun

If you have a hard requirement to use a thoroughly obsolete GUI toolkit, you can for now fairly easily compile your own copy of Firefox for GTK2; it takes around 30-40 minutes on a laptop with a Core i5. (On Gentoo, there is a USE flag for it.)

digi_owl 10y ago
If it is that bloody simple, why can't Mozilla be bothered to provide an official download?!
- kbenson 10y ago
  Possibly for the same reason they don't ship Tk compiled versions. Why should they target every GUI toolkit and complicate their build process which they then have to deal with supporting? If it's that easy, you can probably find some third party that compiles and offers it. I'm not sure why you think Firefox needs to do it themselves.
  - greendragon 10y ago
    I think the third party situation is unlikely, unless they're shipping a fork like IceWeasel or stripping out all branding information. At the end of the compilation process in Gentoo it helpfully tells you (if you enabled the Firefox Branding) that you cannot legally redistribute a branded version of Firefox.
  - dbl9 10y ago
    For the same reason they haven't made 64-bit the default on Windows and provide two versions. There are many users for whom only one variant works reliably. If upstream, like in the case of cairo-gtk3, decides GTK2 is not supported anymore, it's a matter of chance whether your cairo-gtk2 build of Firefox works at all. For instance, for me 49.0.2 gtk2 local build on Arch crashes anytime I try to use the file dialog, while of course the file dialog of both GTK2 and GTK3 doesn't crash in other gtk apps on the same machine. Somebody requested this and the reality has been ignored so far: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1268234 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1268234
    - kbenson 10y ago
      On windows, Firefox is the main supplier of binaries. I would hazard that on most Linux/BSD systems, the distribution is the main supplier of binaries. The distributions can easily build it as GTK2 if they want, or provide a GTK2 variant (and as pointed out above, some distributions seem to, or at least make it easy to build it yourself). If you are on Linux and your distribution provides Firefox, this is a complaint to be leveled at your distribution, not Mozilla (who apparently already makes it easy to build the variant). I'm not sure how we got to a position where people feel justified in criticizing a company providing an open source product that's updated often and provides umpteen different binaries for different platforms and different build for those platforms for not building one more special configuration for what it likely a very small group of people, who can easily do so for themselves.
      - dbl9 10y ago
        In the past the GTK3 code path was tested only by Red Hat as the primary developer of all things GTK and GNOME. At that time, there was only a GTK2 build from Mozilla, and now instead of doing the same as Windows 32-bit/64-bit we're presented with just GTK3 support with the promise to obsolete the GTK2 code, while seemingly not considering the regressions of GTK3. Why do we use Mozilla binaries of Firefox on linux distro where there's Firefox builds in the package repository? Many reasons: 1. fast access to security fixes 2. access to EMEfree builds 3. access to different channels While it is easy to build with cairo-gtk2 as the backend, that code path, as I wrote in a sibling comment, reliably crashes for me anytime I try to do File-Open. I'll try to find out if that AUR recipe or Gentoo ebuild do something different that makes it stable, but the fact remains that GTK2 is about to be unsupported by Mozilla while GTK3 hasn't gotten stable yet, which will make life for anyone that tries to build a GTK2 variant very hard. Therefore, I wouldn't really say it's an easy choice.
        hsivonen 10y ago
        The "EME-free" build differs only by the default value for the "Play DRM content" checkbox. You can put a normal build in the equivalent state by unchecking the checkbox.
  - stonogo 10y ago
    I know you're being facetious, but Mozilla shipped Motif builds for a really long time after most of the world had switched to GTK. Far longer than seemed reasonable at the time. Given that the majority of GTK-running systems support GTK2, and that the GTK3 builds of Firefox require GTK2 already, it seems very strange that the default distribution would bother with GTK3 at this time. I'm sure they have good reasons; I'm just curious about what they are.
    - dbl9 10y ago
      Do you know how to run Firefox 50 with GTK 3.22.0 and the native Wayland backend? If I try it, it crashes instantly, and I was surprised to see gtk3 and gtk2 linkage in the xul libs. Any idea?
- michaelmrose 10y ago
  If there are a bunch of people that need this you could do the community a service by doing it and hosting it somewhere for all interested parties.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    I do not have the time nor anywhere near the resources that Mozilla has to handle this. If i had either i would not be sitting here.

digi_owl 10y ago

If it is that bloody simple, why can't Mozilla be bothered to provide an official download?!

kbenson 10y ago
Possibly for the same reason they don't ship Tk compiled versions. Why should they target every GUI toolkit and complicate their build process which they then have to deal with supporting? If it's that easy, you can probably find some third party that compiles and offers it. I'm not sure why you think Firefox needs to do it themselves.
- greendragon 10y ago
  I think the third party situation is unlikely, unless they're shipping a fork like IceWeasel or stripping out all branding information. At the end of the compilation process in Gentoo it helpfully tells you (if you enabled the Firefox Branding) that you cannot legally redistribute a branded version of Firefox.
- dbl9 10y ago
  For the same reason they haven't made 64-bit the default on Windows and provide two versions. There are many users for whom only one variant works reliably. If upstream, like in the case of cairo-gtk3, decides GTK2 is not supported anymore, it's a matter of chance whether your cairo-gtk2 build of Firefox works at all. For instance, for me 49.0.2 gtk2 local build on Arch crashes anytime I try to use the file dialog, while of course the file dialog of both GTK2 and GTK3 doesn't crash in other gtk apps on the same machine. Somebody requested this and the reality has been ignored so far: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1268234 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1268234
  - kbenson 10y ago
    On windows, Firefox is the main supplier of binaries. I would hazard that on most Linux/BSD systems, the distribution is the main supplier of binaries. The distributions can easily build it as GTK2 if they want, or provide a GTK2 variant (and as pointed out above, some distributions seem to, or at least make it easy to build it yourself). If you are on Linux and your distribution provides Firefox, this is a complaint to be leveled at your distribution, not Mozilla (who apparently already makes it easy to build the variant). I'm not sure how we got to a position where people feel justified in criticizing a company providing an open source product that's updated often and provides umpteen different binaries for different platforms and different build for those platforms for not building one more special configuration for what it likely a very small group of people, who can easily do so for themselves.
    - dbl9 10y ago
      In the past the GTK3 code path was tested only by Red Hat as the primary developer of all things GTK and GNOME. At that time, there was only a GTK2 build from Mozilla, and now instead of doing the same as Windows 32-bit/64-bit we're presented with just GTK3 support with the promise to obsolete the GTK2 code, while seemingly not considering the regressions of GTK3. Why do we use Mozilla binaries of Firefox on linux distro where there's Firefox builds in the package repository? Many reasons: 1. fast access to security fixes 2. access to EMEfree builds 3. access to different channels While it is easy to build with cairo-gtk2 as the backend, that code path, as I wrote in a sibling comment, reliably crashes for me anytime I try to do File-Open. I'll try to find out if that AUR recipe or Gentoo ebuild do something different that makes it stable, but the fact remains that GTK2 is about to be unsupported by Mozilla while GTK3 hasn't gotten stable yet, which will make life for anyone that tries to build a GTK2 variant very hard. Therefore, I wouldn't really say it's an easy choice.
      - hsivonen 10y ago
        The "EME-free" build differs only by the default value for the "Play DRM content" checkbox. You can put a normal build in the equivalent state by unchecking the checkbox.
- stonogo 10y ago
  I know you're being facetious, but Mozilla shipped Motif builds for a really long time after most of the world had switched to GTK. Far longer than seemed reasonable at the time. Given that the majority of GTK-running systems support GTK2, and that the GTK3 builds of Firefox require GTK2 already, it seems very strange that the default distribution would bother with GTK3 at this time. I'm sure they have good reasons; I'm just curious about what they are.
  - dbl9 10y ago
    Do you know how to run Firefox 50 with GTK 3.22.0 and the native Wayland backend? If I try it, it crashes instantly, and I was surprised to see gtk3 and gtk2 linkage in the xul libs. Any idea?
michaelmrose 10y ago
If there are a bunch of people that need this you could do the community a service by doing it and hosting it somewhere for all interested parties.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  I do not have the time nor anywhere near the resources that Mozilla has to handle this. If i had either i would not be sitting here.