Firefox 43 Now Officially Available, But GTK3 Gets Disabled

[lovenemesis]

I think it's totally understandable to ship official build with gtk2 by default.
The people who goes there will probably be the ones who cannot get latest firefox from the distro repo. e.g. CentOS 5.
These distro may also unlikely to have updated GTK3 installed be default.

For other distro, just poke the package maintainer to modify the script and compiling arguments.
Just like what Fedora has been doing for a long time.

[ssokolow]

Is it possible to enable GTK3 in Firefox 43, and if so how without installing a non-official binary.

It's a compile-time thing, so I don't think so... but I'm given to understand that Aurora channel releases are using GTK+ 3.x (they are via the Ubuntu PPA and people in #firefox had trouble pointing me to a non-GTK+ 3.x Aurora build when I asked) and Aurora channel is quite stable, GTK+ 3.x-related bugs aside. (Plus, it lets you enable installing unsigned extensions if you so desire.)

[ssokolow]

Does GTK3 mean that Firefox will finally have CSD (tabs in titlebar) by default? That's awesome!!! I've been waiting this for so long!!!
It had that in Windows version for years but Firefox for Linux was second class citizen. Better later than never!
I'm still using Firefox even though it is lagging behind other browsers but news like this makes me happy! It proves that Firefox is not dead, it just takes more time to embrace cool new underlying technologies!

As a workaround for that, here's what I've been doing for years:
1. Set a WM rule that causes normal Firefox windows to start undecorated (borderless) or set a keybind to toggle window decorations and use it.
2. Either rely on Alt+LeftClick dragging to move the window or install an extension like Tab Counter which doesn't register an input handler so it can be used as a grab handle via your GTK+ theme's support for moving the window by grabbing empty menubar regions.
3. Resize using Alt+RightClick dragging (NOTE: Some WMs may have this feature turned off by default)
4. Rely on the WM's equivalent to Aero Snap for handling maximization.

(You may also want Tab Wheel Scroll so you can slam your mouse to the top of the screen and scroll to switch tabs while maximized like in Chrome.)

[ssokolow]

Well, I am having problems with ff43 silently crashing to the desktop. No error messages on the console. I'm not sure where firefox would log ctd events. This whole "silent" crash bs is a big problem. I'm not stupid and I at least want to know wtf. It just doesn't seem like anybody gives a crap about error and crash handling anymore. It gets totally ignored in favor of complete silence. It sucks.

I mean really, have we moved so far from Unix philosphies that we really don't care about handling problems anymore? Why!

If you're running an official "downloaded from Mozilla" build, you should get a crash reporter dialog when you encounter a CTD. If you're running a distro-specific build, it's the distro's responsibility to set up something like Ubuntu's apport.

[ildella]

That's a poor argument. GTK3 should be installed everywhere already. Also, this build is still not using ffmpeg which is really disappointing, since it's not using gstreamer 1.x either. Why can't Mozilla pull these things together already?

Hi, for me ffmpeg is enabled by default in FF43, also all boxes here are finally blu by default https://www.youtube.com/html5

[duby229]

Well, I am having problems with ff43 silently crashing to the desktop. No error messages on the console. I'm not sure where firefox would log ctd events. This whole "silent" crash bs is a big problem. I'm not stupid and I at least want to know wtf. It just doesn't seem like anybody gives a crap about error and crash handling anymore. It gets totally ignored in favor of complete silence. It sucks.

I mean really, have we moved so far from Unix philosphies that we really don't care about handling problems anymore? Why!

[ElectricPrism]

Is it possible to enable GTK3 in Firefox 43, and if so how without installing a non-official binary.

It seems that Arch Linux users using the main repo will have GTK3 support enabled.

https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/commit/trunk?h=packages/firefox&id=508d2576cbd5699f8343e5e3540d540219992df6

https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/3wxvna/arch_and_firefox_43_and_gtk3/cy0a6zz

[Awesomeness]

Is it possible to enable GTK3 in Firefox 43, and if so how without installing a non-official binary.

At least Fedora and Arch default to GTK 3.

[ElectricPrism]

Is it possible to enable GTK3 in Firefox 43, and if so how without installing a non-official binary.

[smitty3268]

Jeesus christ! If user's distro is not stale shit like RHEL or some LTS fossil, which is probably not, since user is able to install FF43 on it, then GTK3 is present and will be pulled in by package manager with FF update.[/FONT][/COLOR]

I don't know. If you're running a modern distro wouldn't you just grab FF through your package manager from the distro repositories?

RHEL or some ancient system actually seems like the one place people might want to download the binaries straight from mozilla, because the distro wouldn't be packaging it directly anymore.

Fedora has been packaging it with GTK3 for a while now.