02 May 2009

Eclipse 3.4 SWT Tooltips and Internal Borwser Problem on Linux

Starting with Eclipse 3.3 the tool-tips can contain HTML tags. Also the internal browser used for Javadocs and Eclipse Help uses HTML. For all these SWT needs Mozilla XULRunner.

Since the days I was workin for Amiq I've observed that there are some problems with all these. After a lot of time spent searching the internet together with Bulă we didn't found any solution to this problem. All the solutions were related to XULRunner. We managed to solve the problem somehow but we couldn't find exactly what the problem was.

We thought that it's a problem related to the linux distro we used because on some distributions the tool-tips were fine and on other distributions they were hideous.

Recently I've had the same problem on Ubuntu 8.10. Guess what? The problem was related with XULRunner. It seems that the new version of XULRunner 1.9 isn't perfectly compatible with SWT.

So the obvious solution is to use an older version of XULRunner (version 1.8.1). All you have to do is to install XULRunner 1.8 and add the next line in eclipse.ini:
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=<XULRunner-1.8-directory-path>
Now it should look normal.

No comments:

Post a Comment