Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Firefox nightlies for Linux are now using Gtk+3

glandium.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 129 posts

Re: Firefox nightlies for Linux are now using Gtk+3

#41

Post by hsivonen »

scrollaway wrote: post #24

Anyone 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.

Jolla 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

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.

Re: Firefox nightlies for Linux are now using Gtk+3

#42

Post by baghira »

Zardoz84 wrote: post #40
scrollaway wrote: post #24

Anyone 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.

Rekonq 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.

Rekonq 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.

Re: Firefox nightlies for Linux are now using Gtk+3

#43

Post by nicalsilva »

evmar wrote: post #16

Chrome 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…

Firefox uses GTK to draw native-looking widgets. Basically, Gecko passes an X11 pixmap to GTK2 the latter draws the buttons/scroll bars/etc. into it with xrender. This means that Firefox either has to do all of the rendering with xrender and pixmaps, or do an expensive read-back of the native widgets from the pixmap and draw other web content into whatever kind of surface it wants. The thing is, we really really want to move away from xrender. GTK3 has a slightly different API for this and can draw native widgets into any kind of surface that can be wrapped in a cairo context. So for Firefox, the most important part of moving to GTK3 is the removal of this dependency to X11 and xrender. Chrome (as far as I know) doesn't do native-looking widgets (and to be honest I would be happier if Firefox didn't either), so moving to GTK3 is not that big of a deal for Chrome because it doesn't use the GTK nearly as much as Fireox does.

Re: Firefox nightlies for Linux are now using Gtk+3

#44

Post by johnny22 »

shmerl wrote: post #32

Great! 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.

the plugin-container process still links to gtk2 afaik

Re: Firefox nightlies for Linux are now using Gtk+3

#45

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

scrollaway wrote: post #24

Anyone 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.

> 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.

Re: Firefox nightlies for Linux are now using Gtk+3

#46

Post by johnny22 »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #27
keithpeter wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good 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?

You would whether Firefox used GTK+2 or GTK+3.

and to be specific, firefox has used gtk2 for ages

Re: Firefox nightlies for Linux are now using Gtk+3

#47

Post by arianvanp »

xiaomai wrote: post #21
evmar wrote: post #16

Chrome 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…

It's a real shame chrome moved away from GTK. Aura is probably fine for many use cases but it does weird stuff on multi-monitor setups (drawing artifacts and windows jumping around).

Aura really doesn't like my xmonad setup. Chrome doesn't like it at all either. If I lose focus of the chrome window due to a Panel coming up (undocked window), chrome won't regain focus and I can't type anywhere and I have to SIGTERM it to make it work again. quite annoying.

Re: Firefox nightlies for Linux are now using Gtk+3

#48

Post by amelius »

Scarbutt wrote: post #17
evmar wrote: post #16

Chrome 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…

So Chrome has its own GUI toolkit?

Still 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.

Re: Firefox nightlies for Linux are now using Gtk+3

#49

Post by mih »

scrollaway wrote: post #24

Anyone 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.

You should check out Otter browser (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.
Post reply on HN