Firefox 43 Now Officially Available, But GTK3 Gets Disabled

[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.)

[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.

[bkor]

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.)

There are two GNOME extensions which change Firefox to behave like a GNOME 3 application. I've been using these for ages and they work quite well.

[bkor]

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.

Agreed. Further, the GTK+ 3.19.x is moving even more themeing related bits into CSS. Meaning, Firefox with GTK+3.x enabled on GTK+3.19.x (=unstable) looks pretty terrible at the moment. This is just for the binaries that you can download off mozilla.org. Any distribution will enable GTK+3.x support anyway.

[ssokolow]

There are two GNOME extensions which change Firefox to behave like a GNOME 3 application. I've been using these for ages and they work quite well.

I'm glad to hear it for the people who use GNOME 3, but, from what I've seen, GNOME 3 is the polar opposite of "to my tastes".

(I run LXDE for the performance and chose KDE over GNOME back in the GNOME 2.x days after giving it a fair shot because I want my desktop to be exactly so. I ripped out and rewrote my GUI update manager when they removed the ability to turn off daily "reboot to update your kernel" nags and, as an opinionated UI/UX guy with plans to study human-computer interaction should I go on for a master's degree, just the act of repeatedly seeing action buttons in the titlebars of my dialog boxes would be enough to enrage me. Dialog boxes are supposed to be read like written words. For English, that's in left-to-right rows from top to bottom. There's decades of HCI research proving that to be the most efficient and effective way.)

[abraxxa]

I've updated Firefox on my Ubuntu 15.10 64bit and youtube.com/html shows all features supported. The package still depends on libgtk2.0-0 (>= 2.24.0) so I guess Ubuntu didn't compile their Firefox with gtk3 support. Is there another way to check and about ffmpeg and gstreamer usage too?

[droidhacker]

Well, you've just described all the distros an enterprise would use.
Still, distros shipping GTK3 will most likely compile FF w/ GTK3 support enabled anyway.

RHEL is on GTK3 now....
Except for EL6, which has firefox at 38.

[devsk]

Are you twelve, or just think like a twelve year old? I'll take GNOME 3.18+ over any KDE product. I use Qt 5 products, but the KDE stuff is 99% junk. There isn't a single KDE app I care to use. If you want to see how C++ can leave a bad taste in your mouth just look at KDE on top of Qt.

hahaha....you ask him if he is twelve and then begin to respond like a twelve year old....:-)

[ElectricPrism]

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.)

Thanks, lucky for me the Arch maintainer auto enabled GTK3 so all Arch users should get it from the compiled AOR It's still a bit funky with the dark theme but not super far off.

[Dea1993]

please, you forgot which OS you are using. Thanks

i'm using archlinux 64bit with xfce