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LatinCanuck
Making moves
Status: Trending idea

BACKGROUND

  • GNOME is the most popular Desktop Environment for Linux.
  • GTK4 is the toolkit used by GNOME to create graphical applications and widgets.
  • Libwaita is a GTK4 library that helps developers create responsive and mobile friendly applications.

Firefox with a GTK4 Theme among other apps.Firefox with a GTK4 Theme among other apps.

 CURRENT SITUATION

Right now, you can install Firefox and load a CSS theme to make it look like a native GNOME App.
Source: https://github.com/rafaelmardojai/firefox-gnome-theme

While it looks really nice, it would be nicer to have a native GTK4 Firefox Browser with responsive design because there's also a GNOME-based phone environment called PHOSH.

SOLUTION

I propose a new browser called: Firefox-GTK. A collaborative project between Mozilla and the GNOME Foundation. It would be the same Firefox we love and enjoy, but tailored for the GNOME Desktop. If Firefox and GNOME Web had a baby, it would be Firefox-GTK.

WIIFM

  •  A more aesthetic Firefox Browser for GNOME users (GNOME is the default DE for Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, RHEL, EndlessOS, SUSE, among others).
  • Firefox will take full advantage of GTK4 with a fully responsive application that could adapt to any screen, with better touchscreen and touchpad gestures.
  • Better Integration with the desktop and other GTK4 Applications, and other GNOME APIs

CONCLUSION

I am 100% positive that GNOME will become a real contender against Apple and Google in the mobile space. When Mozilla released Firefox OS, the timing wasn't right. But now we have powerful PWAs, and Mozilla doesn't have to reinvent the wheel. We already have a plethora of Linux Operating Systems that work on phones (mostly the PinePhone), We have a Graphical Environment for phones called PHOSH, We have Powerfull PWAs, and many native GNOME Apps. All we need is a powerful web browser to create the perfect privacy-focused ecosystem.

 

A preview of what PHOSH is capable of right now.

Note: There's already a request on Bugzilla about porting Firefox to GTK. Report # 1701123. Furthermore, This topic is also mainstream on Reddit.

24 Comments
billyswong
Making moves

I disagree.

GNOME style is not everyone's taste. It is strongly loved by some and strongly hated by some other. Over-integration to less mature GTK4 may bring compatibility issue to older OSes. Firefox shouldn't join the DE war.

CyborgZeta
Making moves

As a Plasma user, I don't want Firefox playing favorites with DEs. Particularly not if it comes at the cost of integration for those that don't use GNOME.

Anonymous
Not applicable

I am currently using Zorin OS, but I find Gnome lacks functionality for its high resource consumption. Therefore I think it's possible that other desktop environments will rise to prominence in a Linux-based OS. As @billyswong says, I don't think Firefox should side with any particular desktop environment.

box_of_brains
Strollin' around

firefox has a wider userbase than just linux users.

for a browser it is probably more important to have a cohesive experience across devices and os.

browsers these days are basically an os in themselves. i think it is perfectly justified for them to have their entirely own design.

its userbase being as small as it is, firefox should cosy up more to the mainstream, right?

NotteShock
New member

GTK4, yes!

But Libadwaita, no. Firefox isn't a GNOME app and GNOME being popular doesn't mean that it has to use libadwaita. If you guys want to do it, make one with libadwaita for GNOME and one with KF5/Kirigami for KDE Plasma and GTK3 for the rest of the DEs 😆

Sifat06
Strollin' around

I think Mozilla really should make a gtk4 version of Firefox. It doesn't matter if they use libadwaita or not, because someone can fork it later. What really needs to be done is to port gecko to gtk4. If other DE's want native looking browser, they can use a native looking gtk4 theme. As mentioned above, this will benefit the Foss community. If it takes relatively less effort for them, they should do it.

Pixol
New member

Agreed. The Linux community respects Firefox and Firefox developers should return the favor. It’s extremely important for Firefox to maintain a healthy relationship with the Linux community and Gnome while promoting exciting innovation such as GTK4 and Libadwaita. 

Anonymous
Not applicable

Gnome has Gnome Web because Firefox would be incompatible with Gnome's philosophy. Since they don't need Firefox, there is no need for Firefox to overreach.

kepler
New member

Porting Firefox to GTK4 on Linux and BSD may or may not make sense but using libadwaita definitely doesn't make sense. libadwaita is a library for building apps specifically for GNOME that follow the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines and this can be confirmed on this blog post by Adrien Plazas, a GNOME app developer. Firefox is NOT a GNOME app.

Firefox uses GTK3 on Linux and BSD right now and I don't think it uses libhandy so I don't see why Firefox would isolate every other GUI community on Linux and BSD by using libadwaita, including KDE and people who prefer platform neutral GUI apps on window managers like i3wm and sway. Some GNOME users may be enthusiastic enough to ignore the existence of these communities but not everyone is.

If anything, I'd argue that introducing a Qt based GUI for Firefox makes more sense because Qt is more of a cross platform library than GTK and using Qt would be inclusive towards people from the KDE community on Linux as well. LibreOffice provides a Qt frontend and Chromium is working on a Qt5 frontend as well. Here's the bug tracker for Qt5 implementation on Chromium's website.

Moreover, I'm not sure if becoming a GNOME specific app make sense considering some GNOME developers have been known to call their users "clowns" and part of the "internet peanut gallery". If a KDE user wants to use the KDE file picker, there's no way to do that right now except using Firefox on Flatpak, which is yet another GNOME blessed technology which some users may not want to use and may prefer using packages from their package manager.

egiwaq
New member

> GNOME is the most popular Desktop Environment for Linux

This is difficult to say. The kde reddit has more members than the gnome reddit. It is equally difficult to figure out which distro is the most popular one. There is no good data on this.

 

> browsers these days are basically an os in themselves. i think it is perfectly justified for them to have their entirely own design.

Firefox does not do multiprocess scheduling, paging and direct hardware access, does it? I want Firefox to blend in with my other applications. I don't like browser that look foreign. Where is the connection between "Firefox is an OS" and "It should look different from all other applications on my computer"? Seriously, I don't see it

 

> It doesn't matter if they use libadwaita or not, because someone can fork it later.

So if I want it to integrate with the looks of my system, I should get Firefox from shady AUR or github projects with little to no stars, instead of using the updated secure upstream official Firefox package? No thanks.

 

> It’s extremely important for Firefox to maintain a healthy relationship with the Linux community and Gnome while promoting exciting innovation such as GTK4 and Libadwaita.

Therefore it should alienate all the KDE users, because it has the libadwaita looks?

 

Please DO NOT switch to Libadwaita. Please.