August 8, 2012

Kubuntu Gets KDE Support In Firefox Again

Somehow this little innocuous post from our friends at Blue Systems went under the radar. It might be because the interwebs are always about the bad news. You may recall back in March that the news broke that Kubuntu was dropping support for Firefox. Specifically, this was originally reported by our friends over at Phoronix.com, and was taken from an IRC chat log whereby the Kubuntu developers discussed the situation.




Saying that Kubuntu "dropped support" is a little harsh, as the reality is the Firefox's KDE integration amounted to one package called kmozillahelper. Kmozillahelper's job was to make Firefox's various native GTK+ dialogues look and act like native KDE dialogues.
"This is a helper application that allows Mozilla applications to use KDE file dialogs, file associations, protocol handlers and other KDE integration features." [link]
So it's really about creating a better, more consistent user experience. As the referenced article pointed out, the maintainer of the package did not want the burden of keeping up with changes since Mozilla has recently ramped up it's rapid release cycle. Therefore, when Kubuntu 12.04 was released earlier this year, the package was not included.

Blue Systems To The Rescue

Recently, Blue Systems announced that they were picking up support for the dropped package. This means Kubuntu users who want to use Firefox as their everyday browser can have all the goodness of a fully-integrated web browser integrated reasonably well into their Plasma Desktop experience.







How to get it on Kubuntu 12.04 / 12.10

The Blue Systems team have set up a repository that you can add to your system. Simply launch Konsole and type or copy / paste the following commands:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:blue-shell/firefox-kde
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firefox firefox-kde-support
Enjoy a better Firefox experience in Kubuntu!





Source: Firefox-KDE is back again

4 comments:

  1. thank you. However, I've got Firefox with KDE support from this ppa sine two or three months:
    http://ppa.launchpad.net/hrvojes/firefox-kde/ubuntu

    Please upstream the patches.

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    Replies
    1. Yepp I did see that one as well. It's good to have in multiple places though, and should be included on the Kubuntu CD by default. I need to check out what's planned for Kubuntu 12.10!

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  2. The first screenshot (Open File) is of the Gnome-style dialog, not KDE's. Is that intentional, to show people what Firefox's dialogs look like without KDE integration?

    Either way, it's a bit confusing. I think it would be better to show both versions of the dialog side-by-side, with each one labelled.

    ReplyDelete