68867 - Don't use user's fancy gtk theme, make simple custom one

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: XUL, enhancement, P2)

Description

[Vesa Halttunen]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux 2.2.18 i686; en-US; 0.8) Gecko/20010209
BuildID:    2001020908

The look of GTK applications can be changed using .gtkrc files. Sometimes it
makes sense to use application-specific gtkrc files as well. This is also the
case with Mozilla: when pixmap based GTK themes are used for all applications
Mozilla's UI gets slower because GTK first renders a nice pixmapped menu frame,
for example, and then Mozilla renders solid gray on top of it. It would be
somewhat faster to use a "plain" GTK theme for Mozilla to minimize the amount of
rendering required to draw a simple menu.

Most GTK programs use ~/.appname/gtkrc as the name of the application specific
gtkrc file: in Mozilla's case it'd be ~/.mozilla/gtkrc.


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
Use a pixmapped GTK theme. Open the File menu by clicking it with the left mouse
button. Move the mouse across the menu bar so that menus close and open, each in
turn.

Actual Results:  Menus open rather slowly and sometimes it is possible to see
the GTK frame in which Mozilla then renders the menu.

Expected Results:  If Mozilla used a application specific (non-pixmapped) GTK
theme, menus would open faster.

Comment 1

[Keyser Sose]

Marking NEW.

Comment 2

[Keyser Sose]

Really Marking NEW.

Comment 3

[Peter Trudelle]

quick, easy, risk-free performance enhancement?  ->dr

Comment 4

[Dan Rosen]

This seems really easy. It might be interesting to see what sort of speedup we
can actually get on linux, with things like window resizing and such...

Peter: sound okay for 0.9?

Comment 5

[Dan Rosen]

I think we'd actually rather hardcode this. Having a .mozilla/gtkrc file is a
somewhat brittle solution, since a user could just blow it away or augment it,
neither of which we want happening. It might be more reasonable, if we have a
gtkrc file at all, to have it in the moz distribution directory (or maybe living
in chrome somewhere), but of course the real solution would be not to use gtk at
all... Hey blizzard, how's that Xlib port coming?!

Seriously, though, I'm not really sure what to do about this now that I think
more about it, and I'm not sure it gives us such a performance win. Even with a
plain-jane gtk theme, we still draw menus with one color and then repaint over
them with another.

I'm going to future this for now, to get this off the 0.9 radar. I'm hoping we
can come up with a better solution to our interaction with gtk.

Comment 6

[Dan Rosen]

maybe arik would have fun with this...

Comment 7

[arik devens]

hmm...

Comment 8

[arik devens]

i don't quite know what the correct answer is on this. i tend to agree with dr
that the real problem isn't the pixmap theme but the double painting we are
doing.

will think about it / talk to gtk+ people about it

Comment 9

[Brian Ryner (not reading)]

WONTFIX in favor of GTK native theme support.