Hi,
this topic is quite old already but once again that is an attempt to
raise some discussion what can be done in Firefox to make the user
experience nicer when running under KDE (instead of Gnome) on Linux.
During the development of openSUSE 11.2 the KDE team decided to make
Firefox the default browser on KDE for this release for various reasons:
http://news.opensuse.org/2009/10/27/sneak-peeks-at-opensuse-11-2-kde-4-3-experience-with-lubos-lunak/
Once that was decided Lubos Lunak a KDE team member from openSUSE/Novell
started to work on improving the user experience of Firefox under KDE
(http://en.opensuse.org/KDE/FirefoxIntegration) and after some
discussion we agreed on how to do the integration w/o having a too deep
impact.
The result is a not too big patchset to Firefox which basically adds
some hooks in the right places and a class which recognizes the
situation if we are running in KDE and then calls out to an external
helper executable (kmozillahelper) as an interface to the KDE
environment. That way we don't mix up KDE/Qt and Gtk environments in one
process environment.
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/4099 contains also some overall not
too technical information.
Some minor changes already landed in mozilla-central but these were only
changes to Gtk widgets to respect the configured button order.
The repository which contains the patchset and sources for
kmozillahelper is available here:
http://gitorious.org/firefox-kde-opensuse
Please note that I don't pretend that being perfect and ready for
immediate inclusion into Firefox ;-)
I'd like people interested in it to look at it so we can probably make a
plan if and how we can bring that into Firefox (and other mozilla apps).
Wolfgang