Bugzilla

Per https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1701123#c24, there is a great deal of uncertainty about whether Firefox should be ported to GTK4 or not.

This is primarily due to the less versatile nature of GTK4; host rather application-specific theming is becoming more difficult with every (major and minor) iteration of GTK, and less low-level APIs remain available, which potentially jeopardizes the interface standardization efforts of the default theme and Marketing.

A potential method of remediating this is use of Wayland-specific code, but this would pretty much mean the end of support for X, which would even nowadays be problematic for a great deal of distributions (and entire DEs and OSes). It would probably also mean that as Wayland APIs evolve, more work would be put on Firefox developers, all to ultimately duplicate what a toolkit provides.

Another is porting to Qt. QML makes custom interfaces incredibly easy to construct (thus providing the specific functionality that GTK4 lacks) whereas Widgets allow for adherence to native themes without any unnecessary styling to do so. It also works across every major OS by default, whereas GTK is notoriously Linux-first. However, this would require a significant amount of refactoring due to Firefox having been GTK for so long.

Per https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1701123#c23, I and many others consequently believe that a meta discussion is necessary, and that when a specific method becomes popular, discussion be delegated to issues created for the purpose of evaluating those methods, as https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1701123 currently does for porting to GTK4.

Per [`id=1701123#c24`](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1701123#c24), there is a great deal of uncertainty about whether Firefox should be ported to GTK4 or not.

This is primarily due to the less versatile nature of GTK4; host rather application-specific theming is becoming more difficult with every (major and minor) iteration of GTK, and less low-level APIs remain available, which potentially jeopardizes the interface standardization efforts of the default theme and Marketing.

A potential method of remediating this is use of Wayland-specific code, but this would pretty much mean the end of support for X, which would even nowadays be problematic for a great deal of distributions (and entire DEs and OSes). It would probably also mean that as Wayland APIs evolve, more work would be put on Firefox developers, all to ultimately duplicate what a toolkit provides.

Another is porting to Qt. QML makes custom interfaces incredibly easy to construct (thus providing the specific functionality that GTK4 lacks) whereas Widgets allow for adherence to native themes without any unnecessary styling to do so. It also works across every major OS by default, whereas GTK is notoriously Linux-first. However, this would require a significant amount of refactoring due to Firefox having been GTK for so long.

Per [`id=1701123#c23`](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1701123#c23), I and many others consequently believe that a meta discussion is necessary, and that when a specific method becomes popular, discussion be delegated to issues created for the purpose of evaluating those methods, as https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1701123 currently does for porting to GTK4.

Per [`id=1701123#c24`](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1701123#c24), there is a great deal of uncertainty about whether Firefox should be ported to GTK4 or not.

This is primarily due to the less versatile nature of GTK4; host rather application-specific theming is becoming more difficult with every (major and minor) iteration of GTK, and less low-level APIs remain available, which potentially jeopardizes the interface standardization efforts of the default theme and Marketing.

A potential method of remediating this is use of Wayland-specific code, but this would pretty much mean the end of support for X, which would even nowadays be problematic for a great deal of distributions (and entire DEs and OSes). It would probably also mean that as Wayland APIs evolve, more work would be put on Firefox developers, all to ultimately duplicate what a toolkit provides.

Another is porting to Qt. QML makes custom interfaces incredibly easy to construct (thus providing the specific functionality that GTK4 lacks) whereas Widgets allow for adherence to native themes without any unnecessary styling to do so. It also works across every major OS by default, whereas GTK is notoriously Linux-first. However, this would require a significant amount of refactoring due to Firefox having been GTK for so long.

Per [`id=1701123#c23`](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1701123#c23), I and many others consequently believe that a meta discussion is necessary, and that when a specific method becomes popular, discussion be delegated to issues created for the purpose of evaluating those methods, as [`id=1701123`](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1701123) currently does for porting to GTK4.