The Qt port of Firefox...

[xeriouxi]

Hi!

I read that Nokia and Mozilla are porting Firefox to Qt, but this was announced back in August. Does anyone know of any updated news on this project? All I've seen so far is one screenshot of it...

Whilst on the topic, are there any KDE users who are really looking forward to this? First VLC, now Firefox... I wonder what other projects might port themself over to Qt sometime in the future... =)

[mips]

It's going to take a bit of time. A kdemod forums member got it to compile and run on Arch. Apparently it is stable but looks like crap right now.

http://kdemod.ath.cx/bbs/viewtopic.php?id=983
http://img135.imageshack.us/my.php?image=firefoxqtxu9.jpg (Screenshot)
http://browser.garage.maemo.org/news/10/

Best to read the thread.

I love the fact that so many apps are moving to qt4.

[Canis familiaris]

i love the fact that so many apps are moving to qt4.
+1

[Arathorn]

Well, Firefox isn't moving. The QT port is just an unofficial side project. But the fewer GTK programs on my computer the better.

[steeleyuk]

Firefox isn't GTK, it just mimics it. It actually uses XUL for its interface. AFAIK.

[Canis familiaris]

Firefox isn't GTK, it just mimics it AFAIK.

Yes.

[GeneralZod]

Firefox isn't GTK, it just mimics it. It actually uses XUL for its interface. AFAIK.

Yes, and to be more clear: to the best of my understanding, Firefox indeed uses XUL for its interface, but XUL has many "back-ends" that map XUL interface elements to their "native" counterparts. Backends exist for Windows's and Mac OS X's native widgets and for the GTK toolkit on X11. The Qt4 "port" would simply be another backend for the XUL interface to optionally use.

"Mimicking" GTK isn't quite accurate as the X11 backend does indeed use actual GTK elements (rather than just pretending to), but most of the work is done inside XUL with GTK being responsible for the "last mile", as it were.

[Erunno]

Yes, and to be more clear: to the best of my understanding, Firefox indeed uses XUL for its interface, but XUL has many "back-ends" that map XUL interface elements to their "native" counterparts. Backends exist for Windows's and Mac OS X's native widgets and for the GTK toolkit on X11. The Qt4 "port" would simply be another backend for the XUL interface to optionally use.

"Mimicking" GTK isn't quite accurate as the X11 backend does indeed use actual GTK elements (rather than just pretending to), but most of the work is done inside XUL with GTK being responsible for the "last mile", as it were.

Actually, Firefox uses Cairo for drawing both its XUL interface as well as the web content since Firefox 3 and Cairo in turn has backends for native platfom-specific technologies. So, for the sake of adding another abstraction layer, wouldn't it benefit more applications if a Qt backend were written for Cairo instead of porting XUL directly to Qt?

[/threadnecromancy]

EDIT: After a short sleep I think I'm confusing things. As far as I know Qt can already use Cairo as a paint device instead of Arthur.