Firefox Nightlies Are Now Built with GTK+3, Coming For Firefox 42

[tinko]

Oh, great, RHEL/CentOS/Scientific OS 6.x are all f*cked.

Yeah, great.

What solution do you propose?
1. Slowing software progress to a crawl because you cannot use anything younger than 5 years?
- or -
2. Finance the development of 2-3 versions of everything to accommodate for all relevant dependencies.
- or -
3. Setup desktop systems/systems that are meant to run fast-changing software like browsers in a way that the lead time for your next upgrade is not much longer than a year.

For the machines that I'm responsible for I consider option 3 the most clean solution... Red Hat will probably go for 2, so you should be fine anyway. Option 1 is unacceptable of course.

[profoundWHALE]

The (well, my) hate for GTK+ comes from a developer's perspective. GTK+ is an abomination to program anything in. Qt -- while not perfect by a long shot -- is a dream to program in compared to GTK+. My ideal UI toolkit would probably be something like react-native. It's incredibly simple and mostly you can just leave it to the computer to make it fast.

For a real-world example, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON0A1dsQOV0

Thanks, that was a good talk.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

and I'm desperately trying to get rid of GTK3... I want Firefox in Qt ;/

Sorry, but Qt is an absolute PIG.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

The (well, my) hate for GTK+ comes from a developer's perspective. GTK+ is an abomination to program anything in. Qt -- while not perfect by a long shot -- is a dream to program in compared to GTK+. My ideal UI toolkit would probably be something like react-native. It's incredibly simple and mostly you can just leave it to the computer to make it fast.

For a real-world example, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON0A1dsQOV0

Explain how the vast majority of quality software on Linux is GTK based and not Qt.

[emblemparade]

Why are we feeding the troll?

I'm a dev who *much* prefers GTK+ to Qt. Part of the reason is that I dislike C++, and at the very least would like not to be forced to use it (Qt also has an annoying pre-processor that complicated the build process: it's not "pure" C++). Otherwise, the toolset of GTK+ is astonishingly friendly. With GObject, all your libraries become immediately usable in all the major dynamic languages. And coding the UI with Vala/Genie is also quite fun, while still letting you keep your core project in good old C.

In any case, all the theming issues have been resolved a long time ago. Qt and GTK+ (and other toolkits, too) run together on our desktops quite nicely.

[orome]

Why are we feeding the troll?
(Qt also has an annoying pre-processor that complicated the build process: it's not "pure" C++).
...
And coding the UI with Vala/Genie is also quite fun, while still letting you keep your core project in good old C.

Really? you complain about qt moc and use vala. you do realize vala generates C code in a similar way moc generates C++

[randomizer]

GTK+ takes away some control over my mouse and I will hate it until that is no longer the case.

[SpyroRyder]

First LibreOffice, now Firefox. It seems like most things will converge to Wayland and GNOME3 HIG.

I'm guessing you have not read the Gnome 3 HIG or, more probably, have no idea what a HIG is. Neither program are changing anything around their UI and UX, they're only updating what toolkit things are rendered with thus enabling them to move to wayland and mir.

[Guest]

and I'm desperately trying to get rid of GTK3... I want Firefox in Qt ;/

I guess not desperately enough, cairo-qt backend is around for ages and last time I tried compiling it, it was functional (about 2 years ago).
And it's not like cairo-gtk2 wen't anywhere, you can stil keep building for it, it's probably gonna be supported for a long long time.

[ssokolow]

To me, GTK+ 3.x means seemingly constant accidental regressions in stuff that GNOME 3 doesn't use and an over-eager API deprecation policy.

(eg. In Lubuntu 14.04, there's a bug in the code related to client-side window decorations, so things like file-roller will show both the normal menu bar AND the in-titlebar menu... but since Openbox doesn't support client-side decorations, you wind up with two menu bars stacked on top of each other in addition to an ordinary titlebar.)

Also, the LXDE devs gave a migration to GTK+ 3.x a fair shot and ended up deciding it wasn't feasible so they started porting to Qt instead, eventually joining with the Razor-Qt project to produce a unified LXQt effort.