326227 - option to disable the GTK filechooser on request

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 333653

(Core Graveyard :: GFX: Gtk, defect)

Description

[Wolfgang Rosenauer [:wolfiR]]

It would be nice to have a possibility to disable the usage of the GTK2 filechooser.
Sometimes it causes some problems as in bug 310137 and I get many reports
that the old filechooser is much better. (Mostly from non-Gnome users)

It's not that important for Firefox with its UI integration into GNOME but at least in SeaMonkey it would be appreciated to switch easily to the old XUL filechooser.

At the moment we use a small patch (attached) which disables the GTK filechooser if an environment variable is set.

Comment 1

[Wolfgang Rosenauer [:wolfiR]]

Attachment: patch

Comment 2

[Robert Kaiser]

I'd like a way to force us to use the internal XUL filepicker very much, but I think a pref should be used for that.
That pref should IMHO be used across all toolkits, so that e.g. embedders (as long as they use XUL) or people creating their own app can set it and be able to offer a fully themed and maybe limited filepicker and not let the user discover the whole OS.
The pref should be a "force XUL filepicker" bool pref that always uses the XUL filepicker when set to true, and go the current way if set to false, which likely would stay the default setting.

Comment 3

[Wolfgang Rosenauer [:wolfiR]]

I'm fine with every option to switch off the GTK picker, controlled either env var or pref. I'm also willing to write another patch (if I can). But I don't want to decide anything which gets blocked by (super-)reviewers afterwards.

Comment 4

[james.bugzilla]

Credit goes to Robert Strong(Robert S.) on MozillaZine forums.

You can change it back to the built-in filepicker by modifying the following in nsFilePicker.js which is located in the app's components directory. After making the change you have to re-register the components which is easily accomplished by disabling then re-enabling an extension and then restarting. Installing or un-installing an extension will also force a component registration.
code:
    compMgr.registerFactoryLocation(FILEPICKER_CID,
                                    "FilePicker JS Component",
//@line 278 *snip*
                                    "",
//@line 280 *snip*
                                    fileSpec,
                                    location,
                                    type);

TO

Code:
    compMgr.registerFactoryLocation(FILEPICKER_CID,
                                    "FilePicker JS Component",
//@line 278 *snip*
                                    FILEPICKER_CONTRACTID,
//@line 280 *snip*
                                    fileSpec,
                                    location,
                                    type);

Comment 5

[Wolfgang Rosenauer [:wolfiR]]

interesting, but no solution for this feature request. It's just a workaround which works without recompiling the code for already released binaries.

Comment 6

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

comment 4 is not a reliable fix. it may or may not work.

Comment 7

[Andrew Schultz]

bz got a pref patch r+ in bug 333653

Comment 8

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Wolfgang, your call on whether bug 333653 makes this fixed....

Comment 9

[Wolfgang Rosenauer [:wolfiR]]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 333653 ***