Whonix 14 Strange TorBrowser tab artifacts / ugly GTK theme

mig5 · August 3, 2018, 6:59am

After replacing my Whonix 13 with Whonix 14 on Qubes 4, I notice that the TorBrowser has some strange artifacts around the tabs, and in general the GTK theme (such as the file selection when uploading a screenshot into this very post I’m writing) feels ‘ugly’ e.g scrollbars are very ‘blocky’. It looked better under Whonix 13 somehow.

Anyone else noticed this? I didn’t do anything unusual in my fetching of Whonix 14 per the ‘Upgrade’ wiki docs.

Need to adjust the GTK theme somehow to something a bit nicer?

whonix-tb-artifacts

Patrick · August 3, 2018, 8:18am

Does this happen also in TBB in a Qubes AppVM based on a debian-9 (stretch!) TemplateVM vs Tor Browser on Qubes-Whonix 14 ((stretch))?

torjunkie · August 3, 2018, 12:00pm

Yes, but that was a Whonix 14 release a few minor testing releases ago. But obviously the issue persists.

Haven’t explored this at all in alternate VMs to see if it is Qubes-Whonix specific. I don’t think any non-Qubes-Whonix 14 users reported this (?)

HulaHoop · August 3, 2018, 2:32pm

Probably caused by us disabling desktop effects and the compositor for less RAM usage. I guess the price was ugly GUIs :-/

Patrick · August 3, 2018, 4:03pm

If you refer to KDE configs - these may not apply to Qubes-Whonix since no KDE gui is installed there.

HulaHoop · August 3, 2018, 10:28pm

My bad. I thought only Dom0 switched to XFCE.

mig5 · August 4, 2018, 6:44am

Just tried in vanilla Debian 9 with same (latest) Tor Browser. Indeed, the artifacts on the ‘tab’ buttons are the same problem as in Whonix 14!

The file selection dialog is however ‘prettier’ in Debian 9 than Whonix 14. But really it is just the tabs in browser that are most distracting. In any case, seems indeed not ‘your’ problem.

tatertot · August 5, 2018, 12:25am

Related: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13818

Anyway, the issue does not affect quantum-based torbrowser (8.0a9).

mig5 · September 6, 2018, 3:34am

Indeed pleased to see the tab appearance is much cleaner in new TB 8.0 \o/