Jeff Mesnil

Eclipse 3.2 and Welcome page on Ubuntu

Eclipse 3.2 is out and it is a great release. :-)

However, the default Welcome page I had on my Ubuntu desktop is quite broken

Broken Welcome Page in Eclipse 3.2

  • it is ugly
  • the links to the workbench are broken (links like http://org.eclipse.ui.intro/showPage?id=overview open in Firefox)
  • when I close it, it asks me to save a file

After a little search on eclipe.org SWT FAQ, it appears that by default, Ubuntu is missing the MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME which is required by SWT to use the web browser internally.

I just added this variable before starting Eclipse:

export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/

and the Welcome page appeared as expected:

Welcome Page in Eclipse 3.2

I really like the new theme (Circles) by the way. )

Posted by on July 3, 2006

Comments

  • Phillip Beauvoir says:
    July 3, 2006 at 15:21

    Hi,

    you may already know this… anyways… as all Eclipse apps that use the SWT Browser will require MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME, it may be easier to set it just once:

    Add the line “export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/mozilla” to the end of the file “/etc/environment” (“sudo gedit /etc/environment” in Ubuntu). (“mozilla-firefox” will work for early versions of Firefox)

    see http://eclipticon.blogspot.com/2006/05/getting-swt-browser-widget-to-work-in.html

    Phil

  • jmesnil says:
    July 3, 2006 at 16:17

    Thanks for the tip, Philip.

    I tend to have a ~/.javarc that I move from one computer to another with all the settings I use for Java.

    The issue that I’ve with this MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME variable is that, without it, Eclipse is not working as expected outside of the box. For our clients which uses a RCP application with a welcome page, it requires one more step which is not very user-friendly.

    Before Eclipse 3.2, they were presented to an ugly welcome page but at least the links were working. Now it seems that with Eclipse 3.2 the fallback welcome page is really broken (but I need to investigate more before reporting bugs).

    I hope the SWT team will find a way to get rid of this variable for Eclipse 3.3 :-)

  • Alex Blewitt says:
    July 4, 2006 at 12:45

    At least it falls back nicely to showing a textual overview, even if it’s not as pretty as the circles. Some might even prefer the minimalist view :-)

  • jmesnil says:
    July 4, 2006 at 13:14

    Hi Alex,

    Actually, I kind of like the minimalist view and I never bother to setup correctly the internal browser for Eclipse.

    However with Eclipse 3.2, it seems the minimalist view is broken:

    • the http://org.eclipse.ui.intro links open in Firefox instead of interacting with the workbench
    • when I close the welcome page,a dialog to save a random file opens.

    So it seems that with Eclipse 3.2, we no longer have the choice: if the internal web browser is not correctly setup, the fallback welcome page is utterly broken.

    • Comments closed

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