<story><title>Firefox nightlies for Linux are now using Gtk+3</title><url>http://glandium.org/blog/?p=3573</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>evmar</author><text>Chrome used GTK2 as that was current at the time, and when we looked into GTK3 we concluded that it&amp;#x27;d be a pain to target both simultaneously (the point of the new major version number is that the API changed) and that as long as we were supporting old distros (e.g. &amp;quot;Long Term Support&amp;quot; versions) we should keep GTK2.&lt;p&gt;These days, those older versions are dying away, but Chrome doesn&amp;#x27;t use much GTK anyway.  I wonder how hard it would be to target both.  But that doesn&amp;#x27;t solve the binary compat problem anyway.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nicalsilva</author><text>Firefox uses GTK to draw native-looking widgets. Basically, Gecko passes an X11 pixmap to GTK2 the latter draws the buttons&amp;#x2F;scroll bars&amp;#x2F;etc. into it with xrender. This means that Firefox either has to do all of the rendering with xrender and pixmaps, or do an expensive read-back of the native widgets from the pixmap and draw other web content into whatever kind of surface it wants. The thing is, we really really want to move away from xrender. GTK3 has a slightly different API for this and can draw native widgets into any kind of surface that can be wrapped in a cairo context. So for Firefox, the most important part of moving to GTK3 is the removal of this dependency to X11 and xrender.
Chrome (as far as I know) doesn&amp;#x27;t do native-looking widgets (and to be honest I would be happier if Firefox didn&amp;#x27;t either), so moving to GTK3 is not that big of a deal for Chrome because it doesn&amp;#x27;t use the GTK nearly as much as Fireox does.</text></comment>
<story><title>Firefox nightlies for Linux are now using Gtk+3</title><url>http://glandium.org/blog/?p=3573</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>evmar</author><text>Chrome used GTK2 as that was current at the time, and when we looked into GTK3 we concluded that it&amp;#x27;d be a pain to target both simultaneously (the point of the new major version number is that the API changed) and that as long as we were supporting old distros (e.g. &amp;quot;Long Term Support&amp;quot; versions) we should keep GTK2.&lt;p&gt;These days, those older versions are dying away, but Chrome doesn&amp;#x27;t use much GTK anyway.  I wonder how hard it would be to target both.  But that doesn&amp;#x27;t solve the binary compat problem anyway.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>azakai</author><text>I wonder if the difference in decision here has to do with Firefox having its own Long Term Support version. So people needing GTK2 on say Ubuntu LTS can use Firefox LTS for that, and latest Firefox is more free to focus on GTK3.</text></comment>