Re: Thunderbird 1.5 for solaris available on mozilla.org

Michael Tosch wrote:
> Unlike our Thunderbird 1.0.4 built from the sources, this binary
> distribution cannot start multiple instances of Thunderbird 1.5.
> 
> If I do so, the second instance of Thunderbird hangs.
> If I then exit the first instance, the second instance produces
> a popup saying:
> "Thunderbird is already running, but is not responding".
> 
> The same happens if I have specified thunderbird in firefox as
> network.protocol-handler.app.mailto
> and I click on a "mailto:" link.
> 
> Also vise versa, one cannot start multiple instances of
> Firefox 1.5.
> A command "firefox http://www.sun.com" hangs, and if the first
> instance is quit, there comes the popup
> "Firefox is already running, but is not responding".
> 
> Our OS:
> SunOS 5.8 Generic_108528-29 sun4u sparc
> 
> 

I have the same experience, and I'm pretty sure it is because TB 1.5 and 
FF 1.5 were compiled by the Sun Beijing Team with GTK1 support instead 
of GTK2 support.  They compiled all 1.0.x release with GTK2 support, and 
the readme does not explain the reasoning behind switching to GTK1 with 
the 1.5 release.  (Alan DuBoff and John Weeks used to maintain builds 
for solaris 2.8 linked against GTK1.)

I have found the GTK1 libraries included in /usr/sfw are much buggier 
than the GTK2 libraries included in /usr.  (There are a few UI bugs when 
FF and TB are compiled against GTK2, but they are much less severe than 
when compiled against GTK1, and the benefits of GTK2 far outweigh the UI 
problems.)

Also if you use GNOME 2.0 on Solaris 8 or 9 or JDS on Solaris 10, a GTK1 
app cannot due a number of things that you would expect a GNOME app to 
do; communicate intelligently with other GNOME 2.x apps (open a link in 
firefox from thunderbird), correctly interact with gconfd to register 
themselves as the "default application", look up mime type 
registrations, or determine if a copy is already running and if so 
interact with it.

Another benefit of using the solaris2.8-gtk2 builds, was that if you ran 
them on a system that had a later version of GNOME (Solaris 10 FCS for 
example) they share a more consistent look and feel with the rest of the 
GUI, and they are not subject to the same bugs that the Solaris 8/9 
GNOME 2.0.x implementations have; however, the solaris2.8-gtk1 builds 
have all same problems on Solaris 10 that they have on Solaris 8 or 9. 
Admittedly the solaris 10 builds use gtk2.

Neal