12 ms·
Firefox nightlies for Linux are now using Gtk+3
- scrollaway 11y agoAnyone from Mozilla aware of the status of the Qt Firefox port? I remember seeing progress on Github and I was really excited for a while, but it seems to have completely disappeared. Right now the Qt world doesn't have an acceptable browser, which is incredibly annoying for us since we're targeting Qt-based desktop environments. I'm hoping the move to GTK3 at the very least helps towards that.
- mappu 11y ago>we're targeting Qt-based desktop environments What project are you working on?
- scrollaway 11y agoI am the project lead of LXQt.
- rockdoe 11y agoIIRC the ones working on it were some leftover Nokia people. Nokia...I guess that answers your question, right?
- shmerl 11y agoI wish Mozilla started using that instead of GTK Firefox, but they seem to be stuck with it.
- TD-Linux 11y agoI haven't seen any activity around the Qt port for a long time. Really the main visible difference is the file/print dialogs. I think maybe XDG would be a better way to standardize that, and would fix many other apps as well.
- Zardoz84 11y agoRekonq actually uses WebKit under the hood, and it's pretty fast (faster that firefox and chrome) and lightweight, without any issue of compatibility problem on any webpage. The only big issue is that was very unstable for a lot of time.. at least on KUbuntu.
- baghira 11y agoRekonq is dead (as a project I mean), and I've seen plenty of compatibility problems, with rekonq, qupzilla or even the test browser (i.e. the problem is with the engine). FWIW epiphany (or "web", as is it called now) is GTKwebkit based and crashes just as often. Qupzilla-git i.e. the version based on Qtwebengine is getting there, so reasonably soon we may have a decent Qt-based browser (I don't doubt scrollaway knows that). Also the fiber browser looks promising. I do think we need a way to do CI between chromium and Qtwebengine, or else we'll end up shipping browsers lagging one or two versions behind chromium. As far as gecko goes, I think it's over. The hope is servo, which being much more modular may be integrated without struggling with XUL.
- hsivonen 11y agoJolla uses a Qt port of Gecko (ESR, it seems) as the engine of Sailfish Browser, the default browser on Jolla devices. See https://github.com/tmeshkova/qtmozembed https://github.com/tmeshkova/qtmozembed As I understand it, even during the Nokia days, the point was to use Gecko with a Qt-native UI, so it wasn't about getting the entirety of XUL-based Firefox polished on Qt.
- the_mitsuhiko 11y ago> Anyone from Mozilla aware of the status of the Qt Firefox port? From what I can tell the progress is backwards. A few years ago there were Firefox Qt builds on mozilla and regular progress on it. Now the builds disappeared and the only commits to the Qt backend are in some hard to find github repos with no activity.
- mih 11y agoYou should check out Otter browser (http://otter-browser.org/ http://otter-browser.org/). It's FOSS, an Opera 12 clone and uses Qt5. Despite it still being in a beta with known bugs it's under active development and quite usable in its current state.
- scrollaway 11y agoThank you, I hadn't heard about it. I'll keep an eye on it.
- evilpie 11y agoI made some fixes to the Qt backend a year ago, but gave up again rather quickly. There are some rather big chunck missing and as others have said it's actually getting worse. For example the Sailfish people removed the component that renders native buttons, because that would have been a lot of work to port to Qt 5. (So now you only get the rather ugly XUL implemented controls)
- reddotX 11y agoUbuntu has a Qt/QML browser, it runs on phones, tablets and desktop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZsWa6F609M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZsWa6F609M
- dharma1 11y agothanks for posting!
- dharma1 11y agoOtter looks like an active project https://github.com/OtterBrowser/otter-browser https://github.com/OtterBrowser/otter-browser Ubuntu (mainly phone, coming soon to desktop) has these: https://launchpad.net/webbrowser-app https://launchpad.net/webbrowser-app https://launchpad.net/oxide https://launchpad.net/oxide It's based on Chromium/Blink. And Qt itself switched from QtWebkit to Chromium with QtWebEngine - https://wiki.qt.io/QtWebEngine https://wiki.qt.io/QtWebEngine
- blackle 11y agooh no.
- whoopdedo 11y ago"oh no" that Firefox is dropping support for a slightly older technology (again)? "oh no" that GTK2 is a sinking ship that everyone is fleeing from? or do you mean "oh no" that Firefox is going to be at the center of yet another incendiary (and ultimately fruitless) debate. Because I can agree that any one of those is a good reason to say "oh no".
- __david__ 11y agoI've been out of the gtk loop for a while now—I built a couple apps on gtk2 back in the day. What is wrong with gtk3? Why would this be controversial at all?
- keithpeter 11y agoGood question. Suppose I have a KDE based desktop which I gather uses qt as the widget library. Am I going to have another subset of libraries to run Firefox?
- JoshTriplett 11y agoYou would whether Firefox used GTK+2 or GTK+3.
- ossreality 11y agoWow, this is awesome, awesome news. Ahead of Chromium here, no?
- cjsthompson 11y agoAt last!
- smegel 11y agoGtk+3 != Gnome3
- nilgradisnik 11y agoThat is great news. I'm very impressed with the latest Gnome 3.16, Gtk+3 is definitely a step in the right direction. Go Mozilla!
- chrismorgan 11y agoAnd https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=958868 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=958868 indicates that it has true smooth scrolling. That is, in my opinion, the poster feature for upgrading to GTK+ 3.
- andor 11y agoIt does. The GTK3 version of Firefox already shipped with Fedora 21 (last December), and has been scrolling very smoothly ever since.
- ossreality 11y agoNo, it doesn't. "smooth scrolling" != "continuous scrolling" and no fedora 21 didn't ship what is still a fairly experimental feature of firefox
- glandium 11y agoI'm surprised, the Fedora maintainer told me Fedora wouldn't ship with Gtk+3 Firefox before 22.
- abrowne 11y agoI'm not a regular Fedora users, but I was following this enough to notice that it was not default until version 22. There were builds for testing via copr (like PPAs for Fedora).
- captainmuon 11y agoYes, I've been trying the nightly builds (elm branch) on and off for a while, and the smooth scrolling really makes a difference. What it does is it translates touchpad input directly to page scrolling, and not to a series of discreet "scrollwheel up/down" events. Its a very Mac-ish experience. Another great thing is the fidelity of widgets (buttons, dropdowns) esp. on a high dpi screen.
- abrowne 11y agoThis too is my reason for looking forward to Gtk+3!
- evmar 11y agoChrome used GTK2 as that was current at the time, and when we looked into GTK3 we concluded that it'd be a pain to target both simultaneously (the point of the new major version number is that the API changed) and that as long as we were supporting old distros (e.g. "Long Term Support" versions) we should keep GTK2. These days, those older versions are dying away, but Chrome doesn't use much GTK anyway. I wonder how hard it would be to target both. But that doesn't solve the binary compat problem anyway.
- Scarbutt 11y agoSo Chrome has its own GUI toolkit?
- Redoubts 11y agoYes: http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/aura http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/aura
- amelius 11y agoStill when I upload a file, I get the native file selection box. Also, the "use system title bar and borders" option (when right-clicking on the topmost bar) feels a bit like a hack, but I guess it is the best solution to get rid of that extra top window decoration space on most OSes.
- azakai 11y ago
- zobzu 11y agoSo the next question is, anyone running Firefox on Wayland yet? ;)
- sohkamyung 11y agoApparently, yes. [ https://plus.google.com/112174839778779720402/posts/BB586bhiyKH https://plus.google.com/112174839778779720402/posts/BB586bhi... ]
- phkahler 11y ago>> So the next question is, anyone running Firefox on Wayland yet? ;) I run Fedora 22 and tried FF on Wayland. It brought the system to a crawl, but I believe it was using Xwayland and not native. Running it native Wayland is supposed to be nice. I'm hoping my old machine from 2005 will still work great with Wayland. Desktop and simple web stuff worked fine, but it died on cookie clicker.
- shmerl 11y agoGreat! A lot of improvements depend on this GTK3 switch (like using Azure with Skia) and it took quite a while. I'd still prefer Firefox to use Qt 5 instead, but whatever. Shumway however is still far from finished, and I'm not sure what will happen with plugins which depend on GTK2.
- johnny22 11y agothe plugin-container process still links to gtk2 afaik
- gillianseed 11y agoNice, so I assume it will now run under 'pure' Wayland rather than XWayland ?
- Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd 11y agoThis was an important step in that direction but I don't think it's there yet. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=635134&hide_resolved=1 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=63513...
- xpinguin 11y agoDisasterous :( For me, it has begun from evince and deadbeef, now firefox is on its way to follow. The problem is that I am unable to find any compact gtk-3 theme that looks like xfce-b5 theme for gtk-2. Xfce theming engine seems to be broken under gtk>=3.8. The only possibility is to recreate theme from scratch and pray that nothing would be broken when minor bumps again. Hell, I am unable to find any theme compact enough! Could somebody please help me to rule out: do most people really like that ugly-looking space-wasting bullshit like Adwaita (and other such nonsensical things mistakenly called "themes"), or is there some mysterious underground group guarding the treasure chest with human-friendly themes allowing only deserved ones in (how to become that one, btw?)? Its like being forced to leave my simple but consistent country house (gtk2) in favour of tall block building (gtk3), using the lift (smooth scrolling) as an argument. I don't need lift. tldr; Firefox won't be able to compactify its UI to the degree desired. Some users could clearly identify such situation as "regression". I am pretty much disappointed and annoyed of the trend.
- anon4 11y agoPeople seem to like it. Personally I don't, but... yeah. Gtk3 devs have outright said that gtk3 is not officially supported in any environment but GNOME3, which also worries me. On the other hand, this may be enough stimulus to make QtFirefox happen.
- voidz 11y agoAmen to that. I use xmonad, have no desire for gnome, so Qt would have my preference, too.
- anon4 11y agoP.S. and let's not forget that Gtk3 really really wants to draw its own titlebars and do its own window management.
- silon7 11y agoThat must optional, surely. Otherwise it's a dead end.
- ldamerow 11y agoDoes this mean that upcoming Firefox builds won't run on RHEL6, or does Firefox bundle its GTK3 build?
- Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd 11y agoFor now, Firefox can still be compiled for GTK2. I imagine that as time goes on more and more responsibility of maintaining that port will move to the LTS distributions that actually care about that. (This is just what I think is likely to happen, this isn't based on any announcement by Mozilla.)
- uxcn 11y agoI use almost no icons, and in fact I ended up installing a plugin to hide the menu bar after the last UI change unhid it from vimperator. So, I guess this doesn't impact me.
- vsync 11y agoI hope SeaMonkey will still work normally.