Arch Linux

zilverling

Member

From: Bennekom, Netherlands

Registered: 2009-08-19

Posts: 84

[Solved] Firefox gtk3 file chooser sluggish on AsRock ION330

Firefox recently shifted to gtk3. On my AsRock ION330 (Atom330 CPU and Nvidia ION GPU) this causes an annoying slow behaviour of the 'save file' dialog.
In the gtk3 documentation I found that these dialogs, which are called GtkFileChooserDialog: https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable … ialog.html.

I wonder if anybody else experienced this sluggish behaviour of GtkFileChooserDialog and if there is a way to increase its responsiveness by changing some settings.

I just tried to compile https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/firefox-gtk2/ but failed. Anyhow, tweaking gtk3 seems a better solution than installing that AUR build.

Any suggestions will be most appreciated,

Erik Wesselius

Last edited by zilverling (2016-01-15 11:20:50)

Hwiparam

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2011-09-26

Posts: 95

Re: [Solved] Firefox gtk3 file chooser sluggish on AsRock ION330

Well, actually it may not be the best solution for your issue, but a few years ago I had some troubles with the GTK+ file chooser in Firefox.
I cannot  remember what it exactly was, but what I did was to change the ui.allow_platform_file_picker option in about:config into false. Since then I no longer had any issues with file picker under GTK2 Firefox, now it works with GTK3 version as well...
I think that it's better to try this instead of downgrading or building some unsupported versions from AUR.

Last edited by Hwiparam (2016-01-15 08:32:46)

zilverling

Member

From: Bennekom, Netherlands

Registered: 2009-08-19

Posts: 84

Re: [Solved] Firefox gtk3 file chooser sluggish on AsRock ION330

Thanks for that suggestion. It works. I now get some inbuilt firefox file picker, which indeed is much more responsive than the gtk3 file picker.

But it also raises a question: apparently firefox somehow decides that the gtk3 GtkFileChooserDialog is the 'platform_file_picker'. I use the XFCE4 desktop and have both gtk2 and gtk3  installed. Most desktop applications use the gtk2 file chooser, which is responsive on my low-energy machine. So I wonder if there is a setting for 'platform_file_picker' somewhere (eg an XFCE setting?). More in general: if XFCE would fully move to gtk3, I will have to think about another fast and lightweight desktop environment.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,435

Re: [Solved] Firefox gtk3 file chooser sluggish on AsRock ION330

Firefox has other platforms than Linux, for Firefox, built as a GTK3 application, the platform filepicker on Linux for Firefox is the GTK 3 dialog. Your DE doesn't really matter here. (The setting in question is a firefox setting that has nothing to do with the rest of your system, platform in this case meaning *Nix, Windows, Mac)

Last edited by V1del (2016-01-15 09:57:51)

zilverling

Member

From: Bennekom, Netherlands

Registered: 2009-08-19

Posts: 84

Re: [Solved] Firefox gtk3 file chooser sluggish on AsRock ION330

@V1del Thanks for the explanation.

Hwiparam

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2011-09-26

Posts: 95

Re: [Solved] Firefox gtk3 file chooser sluggish on AsRock ION330

So I wonder if there is a setting for 'platform_file_picker' somewhere (eg an XFCE setting?). More in general: if XFCE would fully move to gtk3, I will have to think about another fast and lightweight desktop environment.

No, it does not work this way. GTK2 apps use GTK2 file chooser and GTK3 ones (including Firefox by default) use the GTK3 dialog. Qt apps use Qt file chooser, Java software will use Java file chooser and so on... There is nothing you can do about this, unless an application happens to provide its own dialog boxes for file picking... But that's rather an exception, generally apps written in pure GTK2/GTK3/Qt4/Qt5/whatever use dialog windows provided by the toolkit. Firefox is based on XUL and thus it can use its own file picker if somehow the GTK one is unavailable or malfunctioning as in your case.

zilverling

Member

From: Bennekom, Netherlands

Registered: 2009-08-19

Posts: 84

Re: [Solved] Firefox gtk3 file chooser sluggish on AsRock ION330

@Hwiparam Thanks a lot for your help and information.

In the meantime I think I have discovered the reason for the slow GTK3 'Save file' dialog: a default autocompletion feature (in GTK3).