245997 - Make official GTK2+XFT builds of the Mozilla suite

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(mozilla.org :: Miscellaneous, task)

Description

[Marek Stępień [:marcoos, inactive]]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040608 Firefox/0.8.0+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040608 Firefox/0.8.0+

Currently only the GTK 1 builds of Mozilla are official. The GTK2+XFT builds
(which provide better look of the UI, easier and better font antialiasing and
better integration with Gnome settings) are not official, they are provided by
contributors.

There should be official GTK2+XFT builds of Mozilla suite available (just like
Firefox and Thunderbird).

Also, users often complain in support forums (e.g. in the MozillaPL.org forums)
that the Mozilla they downloaded "looks really awful". This is becuase they
upgraded from a GTK2+XFT-enabled Mozilla from their Linux distro to an official
Mozilla build from Mozilla.org, which is only GTK1 without AntiAliasing (yes,
there's a way to turn FreeType2 antialiasing by a hidden pref, but it's... a
hidden pref! ;)).

This situation was tolerable when "Mozilla was not for end-users"[TM], but now
it should be changed.


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/releases/
2. Click on a link to the newest version

Actual Results:  
No official GTK2+XFT builds.

Expected Results:  
An official GTK2+XFT build.

Comment 1

[Daniel Wang]

see bug 222322

Comment 2

[Danny D'Amours]

At the very least, can a convenient link be added to an unofficial build such as:
http://www.scottbolander.com/mozilla-xft.html
so that people (including myself) don't need to constantly search for GTK2+XFT
builds every release.

Then again, maybe it's a way to "encourage" people over to Firefox....

Comment 3

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

*** Bug 251893 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

I did an unofficial 1.7.3 GTK2 build, and there should be official ones from the
trunk starting with 1.8a4.

Comment 5

[Marek Stępień [:marcoos, inactive]]

This is actually fixed now (1.8a5 has been released with an official GTK2 build). 

Thank you very much for making this possible!