Hey guys,

I was just wondering if there is anyway to make firefox render pages (and itself thought that is less of a problem) as well in linux as it does in windows.

I have taken some screenshots to illustrate the difference.
Gmail in Windows
Gmail in Linux

Cheers
Boffy

i'm fairly sure that the linux shot officially looks better in a court of law. the linux one has more anti aliasing being done on it, the curves on the C's look smoother etc..., and that's normally the big in peoples opinions about what looks better.

OK but is there anyway to make the buttons and the bits around the form look like the designer of gmail and css intended them.

the problem is not the anti aliasing, that could be done in windows too, but the controls (radio buttons, text fields, checkboxes ...) really looks better on the windows version of firefox, take a look

http://perkulio.com/desktop.png

I dont know if this is related with the way firefox render the pages or something else, and Im not complaining really, I like much better how things looks in linux,

btw Boffy, your linux shot looks better than the windows one

Yeah perkulio that is my problem. I really want to change it to the windows style controls. Does anyone know how to do it?

i agree, the fonts in the linux version look better. that could probably be fixed in windows with the "cleartype" thing. but the buttons *could* look less "clunky" in linux. i'm not sure what that's a function of, i guess the desktop toolkit, gtk+, etc. or maybe it's built into ff, not sure.

my guess is that is the firefox rendering, the controls in my apps looks very nice and change with the theme, but in firefox always looks the same way

ok, that's the firefox theme, or the gtk theme, nothing whatsoever to do with what the designer intended. a webpage designer can not control that.

First: IMHO the anti-aliased fonts in the Linux shot look MUCH better than the non-anti-aliased fonts in Windows.

There really isn't a way to make Windows use proper good looking anti-aliased fonts (Cleartype helps, but it only anti-aliases horizontally and does so with color distortion.) However, there IS a way to make Linux render fonts like Windows, if that's what you prefer. There's a big massive thread about that very topic in these forums somewhere.

Second: The buttons and stuff are determined by your GTK theme. In Windows, GTK isn't typically installed and so the Windows version of Firefox has a couple different options to deal with that. I don't remember what the default is; in any case Firefox doesn't bug you about it by default. (Contrast this with, say, installing the Windows version of GAIM, another gtk application.)

In order to change your GTK theme in Linux, you can manually create a file called .gtkrc-2.0 in your home directory. That's if you're not running the GNOME desktop environment. If you're using GNOME, then you can just select the GTK theme directly with GNOME's control center.

Here's an example of a suitable ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file:
Oh--alternatively, you can install a Firefox theme. I tend to use the most popular Firefox theme, Noia 2 Extreme (or something like that).

[edit added:]Oh wait, you're using Ubuntu? That means you're using GNOME, so you don't have to go through all that trouble with creating a .gtkrc-2.0 file. Just use GNOME's control center to change the GNOME theme.

its a lot to do with the *buntu theme not with FF linux vs FF windows.

my FF linux looks way better then FF windows, same system. i just use the default theme in both sides of the computer. change the theme back to default and away from ubuntu and then you should have a better looking FF.

enjoy and good luck.

At least in my case, changing the GTK theme makes no difference in the style of the buttons in FF, the only thing that changes with it is the color, but they remain ugly, check it out

http://perkulio.com/theme.png
http://perkulio.com/theme2.png
http://perkulio.com/theme3.png

I was going to say I've changed the themes a few times to little avail. It would be really nice to improve on that if possible. (Nothing happens when you change firefox themes either)

You have to click "use theme" in the theme manager and then restart firefox (for either GTK theme change or firefox theme. If it isn't working then the firefx process is probably still going.

ps -aux will show you if firefox is still running

Yeah its not that.

I have tried changing the GTK theme(System-->Preference-->Theme) and the firefox theme and neither have had any effect.

There must be a way to fix this

have you logged out of X/rebooted/checked to see all firefox processes are not running like i said above?