[KDE] Firefox 46.0 UI issues

[SecretCode]

Upgraded to Firefox 46.0 in the past 24 hours or so. It's brought some weird and annoying UI glitches - in the Firefox toolbars and dialogues, not (that I've seen yet) in web page rendering.

Many elements, like the address box, have a dark border now. Some elements have very thick dark borders. Buttons in dialogues are too small - no padding around the icon and label. Context menus have a graduated background (which means towards the bottom of menus, there's no differentiation of the hovered item) And the glitch that actually messes with usability - tooltips have black text on a nearly black background.

Is anyone else seeing this? Before I start messing about with themes application appearance settings.

I'm on 14.04. But I don't think it's version related. I think it's to do with GTK changes in Firefox. This reddit thread Firefox 46.0 Released with GTK3 integration. : linux complains about similar issues under GTK desktops. I have not see any discussions of Firefox 46 on KDE.

[Snowhog]

The very first 'suspect' will be the Desktop Theme you are using. Remember, Firefox is written in GTK+, not QT. Not all QT based themes are going to render Firefox satisfactorily.

[SecretCode]

Both my GTK2 and GTK3 themes are 'oxygen-gtk'.

Do I need to restart the app to see the effect of changes? Because it's not making any apparent difference. Changing the GTK2 theme does make an immediate (a few seconds) difference to Thunderbird which is at 37.8.2.

My primary question though is does anyone else have Firefox 46.0, on any version of KDE, and has seen or not seen UI changes since Firefox 45. If not, then it something specific to my setup.

Thanks

[elijathegold]

It seems to be the same issue (https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comment..._kubuntu_1404/). Does changing the GTK theme make a difference?

Firefox 46 looks OK on 16.04 using the breeze themes.

[TWPonKubuntu]

I have seen this also. Plus, I test with the firefox beta and the problem of the black on black "title" box (on all anchor tags which use use that attribute) was visible then (V 46 betXenial Xerusa( and was fixed. It has now re-appeared on V 46.
I have reported this to Mozilla (Help->Submit Feedback) multiple times in the beta phase and now in the release version.
I don't know how quickly this will be addressed, but the more people who report it, the more likely a quick fix will be applied.

This was "fixed" when the beta moved to V 47 and it does not appear on that (V 47) beta release.

RE the other glitches you list, I was able to avoid some of these using a different FF theme. I do use the oxygen theme for Kubuntu but the Firefox theme(s) are limited and do not offer many useful options (none in fact). Most FF themes are unacceptable in my opinion.

[EDIT] Now the title box is white on black, which is ok, I have no idea what I did to change this.
I'm still using the "default" theme for FF.

[urdrwho5]

Today's upgrade to FF 46 was a total failure on 12.04 LTS. I could never get it to start. I ended up getting 45.0.1 ESR, uncompressed it and now everything is fine. So much for my future upgrades to FF on this machine. This laptop is too old to go with anything above 12.04.

I still use FF on an XP box and it runs well. Why did this happen to Kubuntu? No backward compatibility is an odd route for FF.

[Rod J]

OK, this won't help the OP much but it's just my worth

I'm glad I declined the upgrade to FF 46. My FF is pinned/locked to 45.02 just now.

Some time ago I decided to block full version upgrades to Firefox because more often than not one of my favourite add-ons would be adversely affected. I only allow the point release upgrades and wait for a while when FF does a full version upgrade (usually gives the add-on people time to catch up).

Most FF themes are unacceptable in my opinion.

Can't agree there TWPonKubuntu. I think my favourite theme FT DeepDark is great and I like the LavaFox V2 themes too.

[TWPonKubuntu]

Can't agree there TWPonKubuntu. I think my favourite theme FT DeepDark is great and I like the LavaFox V2 themes too.

Let me adjust my statement, and say that the four default themes offered by the update are not acceptable. I have not tried to find other themes. Do note that I modified my previous post, because the "title" text box is now back to white on black, which works fine for me.

[citizen]

Yesterday I searched the interwebs for a solution to this, no luck. Glad to see someone else is complaining.

I'm using 12.04 LTS KDE 4.14.2, FF 46 is a mess. The bookmarks toolbar has no padding between entries, most of which are folders with a drop down arrow to the right. The windows version does not contain an arrow, so this has been squished to look like windows but the arrow was not removed. The mouse over highlighting is slightly off/smaller than the bookmark it is highlighting. It's nice to have more space on that toolbar, but I am a human and I like to read what is there. If the folder icon and arrow were gone, it would be one big word.

I use "The Addon Bar Restored" and all the icons (ghostery, ABP, etc) are squished together like a NYC subway at rush hour. They literally overlap 1-2 pixels. It's like an icon orgy happening on my screen. Ain't nobody got time for that!

My scroll bar on the right turns black on the bottom half after a while. Like there is a dropout in the video composting for the lower half. I use Nvidia by the way.

Whenever I highlight text on a webpage or in the address bar, the highlight makes the text and the highlight white. You cannot read anything.

I also have a weird, very thin black border around my address bar. It's not very noticeable because my persona theme is linen and it blends away. A previous update made the current tab a "frosted" look, which I css'd out since it was annoying.

Whenever I save anything, the Save and Cancel buttons were very thin, not normal. They have magically restored themselves.

I was trying to open the preferences for the "Element hiding helper for Adblock Plus" addon, and it crashed FF every time.

This has to be the most annoying update yet. Why don't they just go work for Google if they are going to make FF into Chrome? Maybe they are Google employees working at FF destroying the competition.
I remember when FF could be used with very few addons, now every few updates I have to add something else.

Sad, just sad!

[Goeroeboeroe]

I'm running 14.04. GTK3-theme was oxygen.gtk. Tooltips on Firefox 46 were completely black. Checkboxes on sites invisible. Etc. I tried several themes: all the same.
I changed the GTK3-theme to Default, and now everything is visible. But the appearance - only in Firefox - looks like Windows 95. Really ugly.
The reason there are problems on sites: Firefox now uses the default buttons, checkboxes, etc. from the GTK3-theme. If there are problems with the theme, it's possible you don't see buttons, titles, etc. (Don't ask me why it's so important checkboxes etc. look everywhere the same.)
With the default theme the sites are looking good (except buttons). Only menus etc. are really ugly. So I can live with that till Firefox repairs this (there are all over the net complaints). Or till I can update to 16.04, hoping it's working there. (Can't update because the Dutch languagepack gives problems.)

[jlittle]

Some time ago I decided to block full version upgrades to Firefox because more often than not one of my favourite add-ons would be adversely affected... my favourite theme FT DeepDark

"FT DeepDark is incompatible with Firefox 46.0"
[Edit]LavaFox V2's tab bar was unusable for me, the tabs were several times thicker (from top to bottom) than the tab bar, so you couldn't see the tabs.

My favourite theme, LittleFox, has worked on 46 with no trouble. It's a theme that tries to waste as few pixels as possible, and the bookmarks and navigation bars have got even thinner. I've had trouble in the past.

Steve Reilly would mutter about security, and how important it is to have the very latest version of browsers.

[urdrwho5]

Don't waste time going to the mozillazine forum because what you'll hear is that 12.04 is old, you should upgrade, etc. That it isn't the fault of Firefox. What? We are only talking about an OS that is a few years old but somehow I still have FF running fine on an XP box.

IF I had known that this issue would happen to 12.04 LTS I would have locked in at 45.

The crash report box that appears has pencil thin radio buttons. FF 46 is a terrible GUI.

Yesterday I searched the interwebs for a solution to this, no luck. Glad to see someone else is complaining.

I'm using 12.04 LTS KDE 4.14.2, FF 46 is a mess. The bookmarks toolbar has no padding between entries, most of which are folders with a drop down arrow to the right. The windows version does not contain an arrow, so this has been squished to look like windows but the arrow was not removed. The mouse over highlighting is slightly off/smaller than the bookmark it is highlighting. It's nice to have more space on that toolbar, but I am a human and I like to read what is there. If the folder icon and arrow were gone, it would be one big word.

I use "The Addon Bar Restored" and all the icons (ghostery, ABP, etc) are squished together like a NYC subway at rush hour. They literally overlap 1-2 pixels. It's like an icon orgy happening on my screen. Ain't nobody got time for that!

My scroll bar on the right turns black on the bottom half after a while. Like there is a dropout in the video composting for the lower half. I use Nvidia by the way.

Whenever I highlight text on a webpage or in the address bar, the highlight makes the text and the highlight white. You cannot read anything.

I also have a weird, very thin black border around my address bar. It's not very noticeable because my persona theme is linen and it blends away. A previous update made the current tab a "frosted" look, which I css'd out since it was annoying.

Whenever I save anything, the Save and Cancel buttons were very thin, not normal. They have magically restored themselves.

I was trying to open the preferences for the "Element hiding helper for Adblock Plus" addon, and it crashed FF every time.

This has to be the most annoying update yet. Why don't they just go work for Google if they are going to make FF into Chrome? Maybe they are Google employees working at FF destroying the competition.
I remember when FF could be used with very few addons, now every few updates I have to add something else.

Sad, just sad!

[elijathegold]

My understanding is that GTK recently c̶h̶a̶n̶g̶e̶d broke the way Gtk themes are handled as often happens when they do an update. They have said that this change is to stop fuure updates breaking themes. Short of waiting for the themes to be updated, the hacky solution seems to be to set your Gtk themes to adwaita.

[citizen]

Don't waste time going to the mozillazine forum because what you'll hear is that 12.04 is old, you should upgrade, etc. That it isn't the fault of Firefox. What? We are only talking about an OS that is a few years old but somehow I still have FF running fine on an XP box.

IF I had known that this issue would happen to 12.04 LTS I would have locked in at 45.

The crash report box that appears has pencil thin radio buttons. FF 46 is a terrible GUI.

So far 12.04 has been quite good to me on this desktop. 14.04 refuses to install properly because Nvidia. And 16.04 will never make it to this box because it is crash central. I stuck it on a Lenovo Ideapad and it just crashes when you change settings. Not to mention virtual desktops are dead now. That Lenovo will probably get 14.04 since Nvidia does not exist on that,

My 12.04 has backports as well as LibreOffice stable so I'm still using some current things. It's nice that we get current Firefox, but current should not include broken. 46 feels like a beta, actually a pre-alpha.

I just noticed my scroll bar is completely black now.

I did manage to change the highlight color so I can read the text I select. Settings/application appearance/colors/colors (tab), then change selection text (to black). However the highlight (selection background) is now the same color (black) that I chose the text to be, but the text is showing white inside the black bar. The actual Selection Background color is set to blue, which does not appear anywhere in FF. So changing the text color actually changes the highlight color instead. FF is so broken.

[Goeroeboeroe]

@elijathegold: Thanks! I searched for adwaita and found Uncomplicated. That works on 14.04 with Firefox 46. The default-gtk3-theme is really very ugly.This looks much better. (I gave up searching after about ten themes gave the same problems.)