beltzner recently sent me an email asking for some background regarding dropping support for gtk1.  I didn’t think much of this — the decision was made before Firefox 2, based on the total utter lack of support for gtk1 from Linux and Unix vendors and the fact that gtk1 had been end-of-lifed for a while by then.  All continuing work was happening on gtk2.  Now, with Firefox 2, the gtk1 widget backend continued to build, and Sun provided contributed builds for Solaris using both gtk2 and gtk1.

However, very little interesting work happened on the widget and graphics front between Firefox 1.0 and 2 (even between pre-1.0 and 2).  There weren’t many changes necessary in any of the widget backends; in most cases, none at all.  With the graphics system overhaul that’s happening as part of Firefox 3, though, that changed.  Changes were necessary to fully support Cairo, and we did the work for Windows, Mac OS X, and Gtk2, as those were our main supported platforms.  Other widget backends that were living in the tree with no owners for years fell by the wayside — these included backends for Photon, for Qt, for Xlib, and, yes, for Gtk1.  Notably, the OS/2 backend stayed alive through the transition — the development community there pitched in and did the work necessary to get things rolling, and, as far as I understand it, ended up in a better place as a result with better support for international text among other things.

However, unlike OS/2, noone stepped up to do the work for gtk1.  There are certainly some benefits to the gtk1 backend; it was, in fact, a good chunk faster than gtk2 in many cases.  I’m sure that speed could be recovered if someone spent a good chunk of time with the gtk2 backend, but so far no owner has stepped up to the plate for that large of a time investment.  But, lacking a large group of people working on gtk2 (or, really, even one full time person — and not for want of trying to find or hire), the decision was made to support just gtk2.  After all, gtk2 is where the current toolkit development is happening on the Linux/Unix side, and various Linux and Unix vendors were in agreement with the decision to drop gtk1 support.

All that aside, posts like this one and this one are entirely uncalled for.  A call for mail spam directed at beltzner is even more ridiculous, because it wasn’t his decision in the first place, nor was it any one person’s.  I guess all internet rage needs an outlet, and unfortunately beltzner has been the public face of Firefox in a lot of these online discussions; he’s got a thick skin, so I’m sure it won’t put him off too much from continuing to engage the community and create a meaningful dialogue with users.  It is, apparently, just one person leading this  misguided charge, but I’m not sure what the end goal is here.  Insulting people isn’t going to make myself, Stuart, or most other people that I know of write gtk1 code.

All the angst misses one important point: want Gtk 1 support?  Great! Write some damn code.  There was no edict from on high saying “thou shalt excise gtk 1 support and ne’er shall it return”.  Code’s still in CVS.  Make a hg branch.  Contribute patches.  If there are people who feel this passionately about gtk1 support, surely there’s someone out there who’s willing to spend a few weekends and get it working.