Dogfooding Firefox GTK+3

Thanks to Lee Salzman, the state of GTK+3 support in Firefox got better. Unit tests went from looking like this:

To looking like this:

elm-after

There's obviously some work left to make those look even better, but we've come a long way.

Ludovic Hirlimann recently asked if there were builds to dogfood and that prompted me to attempt making the builds from the elm branch auto-update. Which, after several attempts, I managed to get working with gross (but small) hacks of the build system.

So here we are, if you want to dogfood GTK+3 Firefox, here is what you can do::

  • In a normal Linux nightly, go to about:config and create the following string preferences (right-click, New, String):
    • "app.update.url.override" with the value "https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/tinderbox-builds/elm-linux/latest/update.xml" for 32-bits builds, or "https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/tinderbox-builds/elm-linux64/latest/update.xml" for 64-bits builds,
    • "app.update.certs.3.issuerName" with the value "CN=DigiCert SHA2 Secure Server CA,O=DigiCert Inc,C=US",
    • "app.update.certs.3.commonName" with the value "ftp.mozilla.org".
  • Open the burger menu, click the "?" icon, then choose "About Nightly". This should check for an update, find one, and download it. This will upgrade to a GTK+3 build.

Alternatively, you can just download and install the elm builds directly (32-bits, 64-bits).

If for some reason, you want to go back to a normal GTK+2 nightly, go to about:config, find the "app.update.url.override" preference and set it to an empty value. Triggering the update from "About Nightly" won't, however, work until the next nightly is available, so give it a day.

As mentioned in my previous post about GTK+3, if you're interested in making those builds work better, you are welcome to help:

2015-05-25 03:37:37+0900

p.m.o

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3 Responses to “Dogfooding Firefox GTK+3”

  1. antistress Says:

    Hi,

    You’re talking of Nightly.
    I’m using Aurora (*) for Debian testing from your repository http://mozilla.debian.net/
    Can I use the same trick to get the GTK+3 version ?
    Thanks !

    (*) I’m not sure about what the name “Aurora” hides at present since it’s not supposed to exist anymore, maybe it’s the nightly canal actually ?

  2. glandium Says:

    @antistress: unfortunately, you can’t.

  3. Alexander Says:

    Great to have builds to try. I’m enjoying the per-pixel trackpad scrolling!