Written by I just wanted to write a quick blog post to let everyone know that we are now producing Linux Firefox builds using the Qt widget set. Specifically, we are compiling against Qt 4.6.2 from Nokia’s LGPL SDK bundle. Unfortunately, the default theme is not working so it might be a little tough to make use of this as your main browser. As suggested by romaxa, installing a theme from addons.mozilla.org should get a working browser. These builds are bleeding edge and are likely to contain bugs, so as usual, your mileage may vary. I’d also like to thank Oleg (romaxa) for the help in getting the SDK sorted out!
Two outstanding issues are a lack of unit test coverage and no nightly builds. I have filed some bugs to rectify this:
- 623740 – run unit tests (only mochitest?) on Linux QT builds
- 623738 – deploy qt environment to linux testing slaves
- 623735 – generate nightly linux qt builds
In case you don’t happen to have a machine around that can run these builds but want to see it live in action, here are some pictures
Firefox using Qt 4 showing about:buildconfig
Firefox using Qt rendering the Acid2 test
Update: the builds are on the ftp server if you are curious.
where can I get this from?
They are at http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/tinderbox-builds/mozilla-central-linuxqt/ . Please note that these are development builds. As with all experimental software, make sure that you have backups before you start trying it!
It is called Qt rather than QT (this is QuickTime).
Finally Mozilla technology will work “acceptable” when running in KDE, currently is just messy (firefox opening gimp to view pdf… xD)
Cool to see Firefox finally moving to a modern and powerful cros-platform widget toolkit. GTK just doesn’t cut it anymore nowdays.
What the long-term plan behind this? There were such builds a loooong time ago, but they quickly faded out, and I felt like Mozilla never put too much effort into this. Is this an experiment, are you trying to drop Gtk for Qt, are you willing to offer both… ? I’d love to see more context than just “qt builds available”…
@jonathan: For a long time on Linux the GTK build got the most focus. But more recently Qt has gotten a lot of work put into it (part of the reason is that MeeGo, which is Linux based, focuses on Qt, and that is making Qt more important in general).
So if I am not mistaken, what is being announced here is that Qt builds are now available for testing. They are still experimental, but at the point where Qt fans can begin to check them out, which is great news. It’ll be nice to have a major browser that uses Qt
– aside from Konqueror of course 
There’s a terrible memory leak somewhere. I gave it a try and in about 10secs my machine was kinda dead. It took me 5 minutes to get to the terminal with the mouse and hit Ctrl+C effectively :S
Anyway… I would *LOVE* to have firefox on Qt. The truth is it started much much faster hehe
Regards
I’m excited to see how well this works, I’ve wanted a QT-version of Firefox for quite
a while! I’m having some trouble, though:
I unpacked firefox-4.0b9pre.en-US.linux-i686.tar.bz2 to
/usr/local/lib/firefox-4.0b9pre/ (I saw a reference to that folder in the firefox shell-script)
But if I run /usr/local/lib/firefox-4.0b9pre/firefox or ./firefox while in that folder it
starts the installed GTK-based firefox-version instead. This is on a Kubuntu-machine.
Any ideas what I’m doing wrong?
Try running it as a different user (and also remember to close any firefox you have opened)
Regards
great news! i’m planning to switch to KDE4.6 and it would be nice to have all apps in Qt
X86_64
Sounds as Firefox will become finally a serious alternate to KHTML/WebKit then. I hope to see OpenSuse-Packages soon
Why no x86_64 build? Also, could anyone give the build instructions?
This makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. Have been waiting for Qt in Firefox for years! Only thing that could possibly make this nicer would be an x86_64 build! =)
Great, thanks! This Qt build is still unusable for daily use but it is certainly going in the right direction. I wish to you guys the best of luck, certainly more luck than those who have attempted Qt builds in the past.
Good, I want Firefox with Qt…
I’ve created a pkgbuild for ArchLinux for the latest version on the server – sadly you have to manually change the version number to the latest version – so it would be cool if you could create a folder “last” or something with a symlink to the latest.
Thanks =)
http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=45473
We do that for nightly builds, but these aren’t nightly builds. These builds are for development purposes.
As soon as a usable 64-bit nightly builds are being generated, I’m going to start testing it.
GTK+ is about to die in the next few years, and it will be replaced by Qt. Porting to Qt is your only chance to survive.
I’ve also recently switched to KDE and bad Firefox integration was really annoying. Can’t wait to see this Qt version of Firefox mature. I would also like to see 64-bit builds to test this out.
Are there build instructions for this anywhere?
I’d like to try out a x86_64 build with Qt 4.7.2
This is the most exciting news I’ve heard in years!!! I want a JS engine with E4X and a browser with a Qt widget set.
Once you are able to build firefox as per normal (https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Build_Documentation), you’ll want to add the following lines to your mozconfig file
ac_add_options –enable-default-toolkit=cairo-qt
ac_add_options –disable-crashreporter
This assumes that you are using the system installation of QT and don’t need to use non-standard paths. The following mozconfig lines are what we are using to get the alternate path to work:
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/tools/qt-4.6.3/qt/lib/pkgconfig
ac_add_options –with-qtdir=/tools/qt-4.6.3/qt
Could you please provide some info about how those files have been built?
It would be really nice to be able to build it for x86_64
I want to build yourself from source. Where can I download the source code of Firefox-Qt?
Will try this as soon as there is an x86_64 build available! Have been waiting for Qt Firefox for years!
It is so broken I can hardly use it.
Back Forward buttons are completely missing, all dialog windows (like Preferences, or Help->About) are flashing and broken and have tons of rendering artifacts.
It seems like whoever made Firefox Qt GUI possible has already abandoned this undertaking. And considering three previous attempts of porting Mozilla to Qt, I won’t be surprise if this one dies off too quite soon.
x86_64 please.
Great news! where can i get one?
Thats remarkable, i in no way understood that Baidu is currently creating which much affect on the research engine market. These folks even now have a lengthy way though to catch up with yahoo. I really feel sorry for ask though.
Gimme x86_64 now
I’ve checked the nightly qt build, and it works, but there’s still no option for thumbnail view in open dialog though qt, unlike gtk+, supports this option.
This is very unfortunate that you didn’t enable it.
amd64 firefox-qt now!
There don’t seem to be any builds to download at http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/tinderbox-builds/mozilla-central-linuxqt anymore. Has this moved?