Firefox KDE support

[sumski]

Also don't have any issues with 14

[Mr_Bumpy]

I can't reproduce any of Jimi-James' Firefox issues either on three different Kubuntu systems.

[Teunis]

Jimi-James, you seem to have a broken installation of Muon and Firefox 14.
I can't repeat any of the FF14 issues you write about.
Muon has an option to lock to a version, just right click the application in Muon and select it.

The problems you see with Muon and the updater might be caused by having more than one client installed, I have only the Muon-updater and Update-manager-KDE installed, not the GNOME version, and all works as expected.

Until yesterday I thought FF14 had regressed re. memory use but after installing some updates and Sumki's KDE bits (and a reboot) it has even better memory management than FF13!

[Jimi-James]

No, I'm thinking of the package called "update-manager" that was very great the last time I used it, but has recently become worse than Muon. It's part of GNOME in general, 2 AND 3, not just Unity. The Ubuntu Software Center is something else.

[claydoh]

This obviously is why Ubuntu's Firefox team stopped maintaining the kubuntu stuff

As to gnome package manager, you must be thinking of Ubuntu software center, which is not Gnome's but part of Ubuntu/unity. Synaptic is still available.



Sent from my SCH-I510 using Tapatalk 2

[Jimi-James]

So, in Firefox 14, I suddenly can't drag anything, whether it's in the bookmarks menu or a picture on a webpage, and the ability to right-click disappears extremely frequently. Whenever it does (probably every 5 minutes on average) I have to restart Firefox to get it back. I'm not sure if this is a problem with Kubuntu or with sumski's KDE support. I've downgraded for now, but it's still very annoying because KDE's update manager STILL hasn't implemented support for Synaptic's version locking (also, when are they going to fix the no-package-names thing?). Actually, maybe I should just switch to the GNOME update manager. KDE's is nice, but it's lacking so many needed features, and it seems that 4.6 to 4.8 was just a new paint job getting almost nothing done (which is weird, considering the amazing progress 4.8 made everywhere else).

EDIT: Wow, nevermind. GNOME's update manager became even worse! What happened to our update managers?

[wrender]

Gathered some stats for PPA usage:


Enough or not to start nagging the devs?

Considering that only a handlful of people that had to rummage through forums know about this it is quite impressive. If you posted it officially on Kubuntu's site and Planet KDE then you would get a proper idea of usage and demand. The fact that a good number of people are willing to jump ship and use Mint KDE just for Firefox speaks of the following and user value placed on Firefox.

Then again if Mozilla wants to stay relevant in a Webkit world they should take notes from the Opera folk and find ways to get their browser into peoples hands the best they can. Perhaps suggesting to them that not doing so alienates their user base and pushes them towards the competition could peak their interest.

[sumski]

Gathered some stats for PPA usage:

python ppastats2.py hrvojes firefox-kde
usage stats for PPA with owner "hrvojes" named "firefox-kde"

 == precise/i386 ==
Name                      Version                  Count
[B]firefox                   13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE   68[/B]
firefox-branding          13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE    1
firefox-globalmenu        13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE   67
firefox-gnome-support     13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE    4
[B]firefox-kde-support       0.6.2-ppa1                  65[/B]
firefox-locale-br         13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE    1
firefox-locale-ca         13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE    1
firefox-locale-de         13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE    2
firefox-locale-en         13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE   57
firefox-locale-es         13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE    7
firefox-locale-et         13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE    1
firefox-locale-fr         13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE    6
firefox-locale-it         13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE   18
firefox-locale-lv         13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE    1
firefox-locale-pt         13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE    1
firefox-locale-ru         13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE   19
kmozillahelper            0.6.2-ppa1                  67

 == precise/amd64 ==
Name                      Version                  Count
[B]firefox                   13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE  101[/B]
firefox-branding          13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE    1
firefox-globalmenu        13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE   89
firefox-gnome-support     13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE   14
[B]firefox-kde-support       0.6.2-ppa1                  74[/B]
firefox-locale-de         13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE    5
firefox-locale-en         13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE   83
firefox-locale-eo         13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE    1
firefox-locale-es         13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE    4
firefox-locale-fr         13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE   14
firefox-locale-it         13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE   26
firefox-locale-ja         13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE    2
firefox-locale-nl         13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE    3
firefox-locale-pl         13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE    2
firefox-locale-pt         13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE    2
firefox-locale-ru         13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE   20
firefox-locale-uk         13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE    1
firefox-locale-zh-hans    13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE    1
firefox-locale-zh-hant    13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1+KDE    1
kmozillahelper            0.6.2-ppa1                  67

Enough or not to start nagging the devs?

[sumski]

I contacted openSUSE ff maintainer about the patches, are they sepparable for mimetypes and for dialogs, will see how will he reply.

And here is the response...

...
> I was wondering what part of the patches are responsible for Firefox mime
> types handling, and what part for open/save dialog? The latter is something
> KDE users can live without, but mimetype handling is terrible without
> patching. Does it also depend on kmozillahelper? Are these features
> inseparable?...

Basically all features depend on kmozillahelper. The reason is that
mixing Gtk and KDE libs within one process is even more hell than this hack.
The filedialog changes can be separated in general but as said all are
depending on the helper app so I do not see that there is a win in
stripping it.

[moray33]

Sumski, you rock!!
The problem with the file associations was a little bit annoying, and the Gnome dialogs looks ugly in KDE...

Now my Firefox it's perfect (only remains to change the print window) with your KDE patched Firefox + kmozillahelper!! I hope you can keep up the good work. Thank you very much! I will spread the word.

If you would like to only receive Firefox updates from sumski's PPA, thereby avoiding Ubuntu's Firefox package being installed over the KDE-patched version:
1) Create the following file: /etc/apt/preferences.d/hrvojes-firefox-kde-pin-1000
2) Copy and paste the following into the file:

Package: *
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-hrvojes-firefox-kde
Pin-Priority: 1000

Now you won't have to worry about losing KDE integration after an update.

Thank you for your help, Mr_bumpy!

[Xplorer4x4]

Sorry I am not quite grasping what it is you are saying. I use an add on called memory restart and it reports memory usage for Firefox(not sure if it counts the Add On Container process or not) in the Add on Bar. As a windows 7 user a few weeks ago, I backed up my profile and imported it to the official Firefox release. I was amazed that my usage never went much over 500MB even with 50-100 tabs open at times. The second moment I installed your KDE patched Firefox(great job btw) I started seeing reports of around 1GB. I just wondered if any one had noticed a similar trend, or if perhaps one of my extensions received an update that is causing a memory leak.

[sumski]

5 tabs:

The process firefox (with pid 19461) is using approximately 284.9 MB of memory.
It is using 283.5 MB privately, and a further 7.7 MB that is, or could be, shared with other programs.
Dividing up the shared memory between all the processes sharing that memory we get a reduced shared memory usage of 1423.0 KB. Adding that to the private usage, we get the above mentioned total memory footprint of 284.9 MB.
12.0 KB is swapped out to disk, probably due to a low amount of available memory left.

Nightly (without KDE patches), same 5 tabs:

The process RunProcess (with pid 19892) is using approximately 302.5 MB of memory.
It is using 296.7 MB privately, and a further 16.4 MB that is, or could be, shared with other programs.
Dividing up the shared memory between all the processes sharing that memory we get a reduced shared memory usage of 5.8 MB. Adding that to the private usage, we get the above mentioned total memory footprint of 302.5 MB.

[Xplorer4x4]

When I was using the official Ubuntu version, my RAM usage was usually about 500 MB max with all my add ons and 50+ tabs open. Since switching to this build I am sitting at 420MB and I just restarted firefox and have a total of 3 tabs open. Has any one else noticed a major increase in resource usage with the KDE optimized build?

[sumski]

+1 I don't care so much about the perfect KDE integration, with the open dialog and such. I can live without that. But the broken mime types are unacceptable imho. Guessing, but it seems like this would not be too hard to maintain as that stuff should rarely ever change? Even if there was a single additional package I could install say firefox-mime-types, that would make me happy.

Not sure why kubuntu leaves out the mimetypes for FF. Total annoyance tho.

I contacted openSUSE ff maintainer about the patches, are they sepparable for mimetypes and for dialogs, will see how will he reply.

Also, new beta emerged... :|

[eggbert]

it might not be a lot easier to focus on the parts of FF that are actually broken in Kubuntu. Namely the mimetype handling.

+1 I don't care so much about the perfect KDE integration, with the open dialog and such. I can live without that. But the broken mime types are unacceptable imho. Guessing, but it seems like this would not be too hard to maintain as that stuff should rarely ever change? Even if there was a single additional package I could install say firefox-mime-types, that would make me happy.

Not sure why kubuntu leaves out the mimetypes for FF. Total annoyance tho.