Firefox GTK+ Integration

Firefox GTK+ Integration

Posted May 29, 2008 2:50 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
In reply to: Firefox GTK+ Integration by GreyWizard
Parent article: Fsyncers and curveballs (the Firefox 3 fsync() problem)

For most users the GTK+ file browser is used infrequently and works more or less instantaneously.

Umm... have you tried it? Try the Open With... dialog.

Look, I don't know what percentage of Linux users use GNOME, but it's probably 50% or less. So the people who don't use GNOME have the choice between an irritatingly non-standard but fast file browser, or an irritatingly non-standard and agonizingly-slow file browser. GNOME users are luckier; at least their agonizingly-slow file browser is "standard".

On my machine, the gtk+ browser takes about 25 seconds to browse /usr/bin wherease the Mozilla version is too fast to time. Why is that? The gtk+ browser, when faced with files without extensions, opens and reads a bit of every single file to identify the file type (by "magic") so it knows which pretty little icon to display. If that isn't abominable, I don't know what is.

Better yet, find the bug in the GTK+ file browser and submit patches.

I filed a bug with the gtk+ authors. Someone else has even submitted patches. They have not (to my knowledge) been accepted.

As for breaking printing not being a "catastrophe", you are right. But it is a major regression and stumbling block, and to argue otherwise is simply absurd.

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I suspect you're running an ancient version of GNOME and GTK+.  On a Fedora 9 system browsing
/usr/bin from "Open with..." seems snappy to me even on a low end laptop.  Most likely the
file magic problem you're describing got fixed some time ago.  Furthermore your point about
GNOME is similarly outdated because the file browser is part of GTK+ itself these days.  So
it's standard for all GTK+ applications.

Breaking printing for all users would indeed be a catastrophe (or at least it would in a final
release, which hasn't happened).  But that isn't the case here.  So far all we've established
is that printing is broken for one user with an unusual configuration.  That's unfortunate and
certainly a stumbling block -- for you -- but it's not a major regression from the perspective
of the Firefox team and certainly doesn't indicate that the project is moving in the wrong
direction.

To argue otherwise is to expose an inflated sense of your own importance.