GNU IceCat KDE

[Leo Rockway]

Hello everyone, 

[beware, very long email ahead]

I'm a KDE user and I was trying to make GNU IceCat integrate better with my 
desktop environment. I had heard about the openSuse patches that seemed to 
accomplish this so I looked for them and proceeded to patch the sources and 
compile xulrunner and GNU IceCat. I probably did this some 8 or 9 times 
(yeah... I'm not kidding). There was some sort of bug that prevented me from 
doing make install on GNU IceCat (the bug wasn't on GNU IceCat itself -or at 
least I don't think it was-, but on the patched sources). But at least the 
compilation was working (even if I couldn't make install) and I got to try 
this integration.

The supposed benefits of these patches are that you get a nice KDE dialog when 
you have to pick a file (as in "file > open"), KDE proxy configuration, 
buttons on the right side (Gnome has them backwards!) and I think that was 
about it, but I'm probably forgetting something.
I managed to get some of these things to work. The proxy part was a complete 
failure and I had to ditch that patch because it made the compilation fail. 
The things that worked weren't worth all the effort of compiling, but I 
figured that if I found a way to automatize this, then there could be binaries 
for KDE available in GNUzilla. The sad thing is that these patches break a lot 
of other stuff: "save as" doesn't work anymore (some problem with openDesktop, 
according to the debugging console), and the "save image" option is missing. I 
found that the benefits weren't enough to outweigh the problems.

But I didn't give up. On my search for an integrated GNU IceCat KDE I found a 
couple of addons and configurations that would help you make your GNU IceCat 
look almost as a native app.

The first step is getting the Oxygen theme [0] which is GPL. This theme has 
the particularity of changing your "about" image for a nice picture of Kongi 
with the Firefox panda... which is unacceptable for us! So I decided to work 
on my GIMP skills (yes, I use GIMP and not Krita... so what?) and I came up 
with a nice logo for GNU IceCat KDE [1]. To replace the Firefox branding just 
look for the "preview.png" and "about.png" files in your ~/.gnuzilla folder. 
If you have more than one of those files, just look for the Konqi one. Konqi 
is LGPL, so this nice image I put together is freedom compliant.

Okay, next thing is to get some GNU IceCat and KWallet integration: Just go 
get the addon for KWallet [2] and be happy. This addon is GPL (I wish that 
kde-look and kde-apps specified the version of the licenses...).

The last addon that I'm going to introduce today is called PlasmaNotify [3] 
and it's perfect to replace those ugly GTK boxes for beautiful KDE Plasma 
notifications when your downloads are completed. This addon is GPLv3, but I 
had to contact the author to find that out because I couldn't see it anywhere 
else [4] (just look at the comments).

And, for the final touch, you can still have nonGTK file chooser dialogs 
without patching GNU IceCat sources! They are not KDE file choosers, but they 
are good enough (they look like the OpenOffice.org KDE integration, which is 
very Qtesque). I found this out in the Oxygen theme page at Mozilla: Enter 
"about:config" in the address bar, look for the 
"ui.allow_platform_file_picker" key and change its value to "false".

If you follow all these steps your browser will look really pretty [5]

Sorry for the long email, hopefully it will be worth it to make some KDE users 
happy =]
Enjoy your GNU IceKat!

Namaste,
Leonardo

ps: I just realized that the name of this list is "bug-gnuzilla" and none of 
these were GNU IceCat bugs!

pps: I'm having some ISP problems, so if the files on 
http://leorockway.com.ar/icecat/ are not available, try again later.

[0] http://kde-
look.org/content/show.php/Oxygen+KDE+%28Firefox+Theme%29?content=117962

[1] http://leorockway.com.ar/icecat/icekat.png

[2] http://www.kde-
apps.org/content/show.php/Firefox+addon+for+kwallet?content=116886

[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/12196

[4] http://www.andreas-demmer.de/2009/05/31/plasmanotify_-
_firefox_spricht_plasma/comment-page-1/#comment-365

[5] http://leorockway.com.ar/icecat/final.png

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