Firefox Gentoo
Before I’ll start describing my adventure with firefox on gentoo, I’ll clarifythat firefox is the only browser that I am using on my computers (welllinks/elinks/w3m for text browsing) and hopefully nothing is going to change mymind. Why so?
For the past couple of years I have tried a bunch of alternatives and still believethat firefox is the best choice. When chrome(ium) became popular, a lot of peopleswitched to the glorious product of google, and it seems to me that the onlyreason for that switch was a very good job of google’s marketing department.I found it quite cheeky when they started the overall development, as firefox wasreally the best on the market at that time, it was free, and it was way more popularthan anything else, that was probably something that google couldn’t tolerate.I always ask myself, wouldn’t it be more productive, to jointhe forces and to work on one product? But then I kind of realise that if itwould happen we would really end up with monopoly in the world of browsers,which we don’t want.
So, my main dissatisfaction with chromium and any webkit-based browser is thatthey cannot fix freaking selection. I can’t show the picture, as I don’t haveit installed, but whenever you select a text on a page with a complex layout,selection goes faaaar beyond the text and selects some random areas of theweb-page. You guys might say that I am picky, but this selection thing reallydrives me nuts. Can anyone fix it?
Firefox is a free and open source web browser developed and maintained by the Mozilla Corporation which is owned by the Mozilla Foundation. It is known for its high degree of customizability through add-ons and its adherence to Web standards. Firefox on Gentoo Apr 9 th, 2013 Comments Before I’ll start describing my adventure with firefox on gentoo, I’ll clarify that firefox is the only browser that I am using on my computers (well links/elinks/w3m for text browsing) and hopefully nothing is going to change my mind.
Another thing that nobody can mimic isVimperator. Yeah, there are someplugins in chrome, but they are just funny. Vimperator is not about addingh,j,k shortcuts, seriously. Look at the code if you don’t believe me.
Finally, to my impression firefox is the best balance between speed andresources. Probably chrome can do regexps faster, but on my system it eatsnoticeably more memory which means that if you have more that one tabopen then most of the regexp effort goes down the drain because of memoryoverheads. It is not really a scientific fact – just my personal intuition.May be you can configure this stuff, but after I used all my patience,firefox is still the winner.
Change The Interface Language (L10N)
Running browsers on gentoo
Any browser is a critical application, which should work fast and shouldn’t fail.That is why I am and will compile all my browsers from source with the highestpossible optimisations. After one of recompilations I found out that sometimesthe fonts were rendered bold in the places where they shouldn’t be. Mainly ithappened when you scroll up and down with a wheel of your mouse. See the picturebelow.
A couple of phrases in the middle of the wikipedia page look like if they arebold. In the beginning I though that it is a problem of fontconfig andinfinality which I was actively configuring at that time. Later I found outthat it was a problem in firefox itself. The thing happens not very often and ifyou select and deselect this bold text, the boldness goes away. So in principleyou could even live with this thing, it is just quite annoying.
After some googling I found abugin the firefox bugzilla marked as fixed.Well, it definitely wasn’t fixed on my system, and I am usingthe latest releases. Then I started to read the patches andinvestigate what the hell is going on. It turned out, that the problem hadsomething to do with the bug in cairo, and firefox people have their ownversion of cairo, where they happily committed the fix. So far so good, butgentoo is linking against system cairo which does not have these changes.
Anyone knows why?
Anyhow, after some more investigation I found a flag which links against cairofrom the firefox repository. The flag is called --disable-system-cairo :)So all you need to do is to add the following line to the e-build:
A List Of Free Software Add-ons Compiled By The GNU Project.
recompile, and the problem happily goes away. May be one day I will putan overlays for that. May be one day gentoo people will add this thing intodefault tree. Gentoo people, where are you? :)