Comment 84 for bug 133133

(In reply to M Lopez-Ibanez from comment #44)
> (In reply to Szczepan Hołyszewski from comment #42)
> > I am starting to suspect developer malice here.
>
> That seems uncalled for.

I agree that this is a bit too much, no malice involved; I think it's mostly due to lack of time/resources....etc.

> Firefox developers working on Linux issues are very
> few and hard-working.

Any official stats/references about how many Firefox devs are actually working on Linux?

> They need more love and support and not users throwing
> accusations. Also, if you honestly want to see support of Linux continued,
> you are shooting yourself in the foot with such a comment: Which developer
> wants to work on supporting an OS when users of that OS accuse them of
> malice? Scaring developers away is not the way to improve such support!
>
> The reality is that there are very few Firefox developers that use
> GNU/Linux, and all of them probably use GNOME/GTK.

Again any references/stats?

> GTK developers have
> contributed at lot to Mozilla/Firefox,

Well, the most obvious reason is that Firefox is built on GTK+*. I think if Firefox was built on Qt it would have gotten a lot of contribution from Qt devs, that's the nature of using a toolkit to build your software...

> whereas KDE has its own browser
> (Konqueror and now Rekonq).

That's not really a point since GNOME has its own browser too, it's called Epiphany, a WebKit based browser (it's been renamed to "Web" lately https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web/).

> The people that have tried to improve Firefox on
> KDE have done so by creating add-ons or distribution-specific patches. This
> is a quick way to get results but tends to bitrot and break sooner or later.
>

IIRC those changes were submitted as bug reports upstream but were rejected hence the distribution patches/addons.

> The *only* way Firefox support for KDE will improve is if people using
> Firefox on KDE join Firefox development and do it. If you cannot do it
> yourself for lack of time or skills, create a kickstarter and hire a
> developer that can. If you do not have skills, money, or time, and you
> cannot figure out another way to help, then resign yourself in silence
> because it will probably get worse.

This issue isn't KDE specific; the issue here is that there's no easy was to make Firefox use whatever file manager you set as the default in Linux. Even under GNOME you'd hit the same problem if you want to use a file manager other than Nautilus; you can configure GNOME to use whatever file manager you want but Firefox would ignore those settings.

Firefox could use xdg-open (this was suggested in previous comments in this report) which is supposed to be distro-agnostic; given xdg* isn't perfect but it's better than using a dbus method that's only implemented by Nautilus under GNOME.

> Attacking developers, whining and
> useless comments (mine ones included, unfortunately) only make developers
> *less* inclined to follow bug reports about KDE.
True, insulting devs isn't good any which way one thinks about it. But I think frustration can lead to such accusations flying around; the open-containing-folder feature misbehaving for anything other than Nautilus has been around for more than 8 years... that is rather a long time.

/me going back to "resign myself in silence" :).