I recently installed Slackware64 14.0 on a machine that is new to me. I use ratpoison as my windows manager. In this new installation I noticed that the style of the popup widnows generated by firefox/xulrunner and thunderbird have changed. They are very annoying because most of the time they will not go away unless you click on the X to close them. I would much prefer being be able to hit escape or enter to dismiss these popup.

I could not find any convenient/simple way to change the style of popups. Since I have not had this popup problem on any of my other machines, I assumed the problem had something to do with how firefox/xulrunner and thunderbird were compiled. I removed the slackware/slackbuild packages for these programs and installed them manually and I now have the popup windows to which I am accustomed.

My question for the forum, is there anything simpler that I could have done other than manually install these packages?

Thanks

Other than check for an "about:config" option, probably not.

I looked at the source for firefox and there is an option to disable libnotify. I assume there is something similar for thunderbird.
I am glad to know there is an option but for now rather than recompile, I guess I will stick with the 32bit firefox/thunderbird binary avialable from mozilla.

There is no shame in it ;-)
One nice thing about Slackware is in situations like this
there is no all-seeing, all-controlling package management suite
that you have to fight against, or deceive.