Firefox and KDE: How to Play Nice

If you read my blog, odds are you're using Firefox--48%, vs. 35% for Internet Explorer.  (Incidentally, this is way above average; I guess my readers are much smarter than average!)  Most of you are running Firefox on Windows (54%) so you don't need to worry about Firefox playing nice with KDE.  However, a full quarter of you (26%) are running OpenSUSE.  Keep reading.

Have you noticed Firefox doesn't match the colors on the rest of OpenSUSE?  Have you noticed certain other programs (like GIMP or Pidgin) don't either?  That's because these programs were designed to work with Ubuntu, not OpenSuse.  Even though they're both Linux, there are subtle differences.

Technical explanation: Ubuntu uses Gnome and OpenSUSE uses KDE, and since Ubuntu is more popular, Firefox was designed to work with it.  To get even more technical, Gnome uses GTK and KDE uses QT.  Thus, Firefox was designed to work with GTK, not QT.  Firefox still runs very well in OpenSUSE, but the appearance doesn't match.

The solution: you have to run the GTK Theme Manager.  You can install it by running this command: sudo zypper install gtk-chtheme

Then you can pick the GTK theme you want and it will stick in Firefox, Pidgin, GIMP, and any other program that was written with GTK.  Just pick something that matches your OpenSUSE theme and you won't go nuts.

More info here: [SOLVED] GTK Style breaks on restart - Page 2