Firefox 50.0

Built 50.0 with cairo-gtk2 backend using it right now but something different with the font rendering in 50.0. For instance there's a weird washed-out effect of the text in this very same text control I'm writing the comment in which comes and goes with the amount of text changing/wrapping etc.

Here it is: https://github.com/mozilla/vtt.js/pull/355

> First is the GTK3 port of Firefox not working as a native Wayland GTK3 window.

Is that officially supported yet? I see that back in June/July experimental support was released. Possibly is the current work in an effort to get that working, but it's not ready yet? I just tracked down what looks like the feature tracking bug[1], and it doesn't appear to be ready, but I could be reading it wrong.

> Second is the themeing issues with GTK3 that people ran into, which is something you can live with.

Sure, but from my own problems with themes in Chrome, it's not something you want to live with, especially if you used themes to signify instance information and they stopped working, so I feel people's pain there. :/ Preferably Mozilla would have kept this gated in a branch or experimental build until these issues were worked out. That said, earlier today I did see something about plugins built using GTK2 being loaded into Firefox with GTK3 and the symbols loading wrong, so perhaps it's a much harder problem than it seems, and if it requires theme's to rebuild, then perhaps the quickest and easiest way to make that happen is to force a little breakage. Then again, the distro build probably makes sure this isn't a problem.

> I'm surprised at the seemingly isolated echo chamber perspective of the GTK3 devs.

I imagine that's somewhat to do with where their focus lies. I'm under the impression that a lot of the funding comes from Red Hat, so there are likely complex motives at multiple levels from the enterprise to the funded developers (who might want to justify their paycheck).

In the end, it's one of those things that's hard to accurately critique as an outsider, because there's a lot of specific information that goes into a decision like that. Is a GTK2 to GTK3 migration easier than a GTK2 to QT (or some other toolkit) migration? Probably, but by how much? If this was happening a few years ago, we might be complaining that Firefox uses a toolkit (that is, underneath their own toolkit) instead of X directly. Now we have X and Wayland, so that wouldn't have presented a similar situation anyway. In the end, unless you have some upstream vendor willing to put lots of time and money into making sure you have a performant, backwards compatible API to call (e.g. Microsoft), you'll probably want to make changes at some point in any long-lived project.

1: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=635134

JS source maps support is a big one for devs.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Releases/50#Chan...