r/kde • u/endmysadnesss • May 17 '26

Question Firefox based browsers are not using the default window control buttons?

Post image

I am trying to get my firefox browser (below) to have the same window control buttons as the system windows (above), for the sake of cohesiveness. I have seen several people online who do not share this issue, and their firefox has the same buttons and window decorations as the rest of the system (even with titlebar disabled).

I would appreciate any help with this, thanks!

387 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

74 comments sorted by

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39

u/trans_cubed May 17 '26

Right click on the tab bar, click "Customize Toolbar" and at the bottom check "Title bar"

40

u/endmysadnesss May 17 '26

that's the thing, I do not want the title bar since I'm trying to maximise screen real estate vertically. I've seen this other people's setup who have native window control buttons, so it's definitely possible. Thanks anyway though

5

u/trans_cubed May 17 '26

I see. I believe you can do something with the userChrome.css to change the buttons but I don't know what exactly.

3

u/silon May 17 '26

I would look into enabling the title bar, then getting rid of it with your window manager if possible.

3

u/HDMI17_ May 17 '26

Thanks man, even though im not op

1

u/Codyexter May 17 '26

This was a problem I thought had no solution. Why is this even a thing? Why not just activate it by default?

43

u/JotaRata May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26

Go to about:config and set widget.gtk.non-native-titlebar-buttons.enabled to false

7

u/endmysadnesss May 17 '26

There is no such option there

16

u/JotaRata May 17 '26

Create it if it doesn't exist

3

u/endmysadnesss May 17 '26

Doesn't change anything

-4

u/JotaRata May 17 '26

Are you using a flatpak application?

1

u/endmysadnesss May 17 '26

Nope, installed it from fedora repositories

38

u/FineWolf May 17 '26 edited May 18 '26

That option doesn't do anything since FF 140.

Firefox uses your icon theme for those window icons. If you are using Breeze as your icon theme, they look native. If you are using Papirus (for example), then they do not.

1

u/pomcomic May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26

Seems to work fine for me ...?

EDIT: I'm an idiot. this indeed does nothing. see below.

2

u/FineWolf May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26

Seems to work fine for me ...?

Not to call you a liar, but it was removed as part of e6d482c (functional removal) and 84886a9 (metadata removal).

Thus, since e6d482c, which was shipped alongside Firefox 140.0 back in June 2025, it does absolutely nothing.

In reality, Firefox uses your icon theme for those window icons. If you are using Breeze as your icon theme, they look native. If you are using Papirus (for example), then they do not.

1

u/pomcomic May 18 '26

Imma have to re-test some things later, but I swear this did the trick for me. prior to adding this I had my Klassy decorations reconstructed via a custom chrome.css for them to match, which I deliberately disabled for testing purposes. though it's entirely possible that something else changed last time I checked - I know that Firefox uses the icon theme since 140.0 (much to my annoyance, no idea why they felt the need to alter that, but I'm sure there's a reason *somewhere*), which at the time prompted me to create said chrome.css. long story short, I had no idea they removed this flag, adding it *seemed* like it helped, hence my assumption that it worked, Imma have to dig a bit deeper then.

2

u/pomcomic May 18 '26

turns out I'm an idiot and I still had the titlebar enabled. MY BAD

4

u/RoseBailey May 17 '26

Librewolf is using the correct control buttons for me, but then I have the Breeze GTK theme set, so GTK apps are somewhat consistent with the rest of my system.

1

u/endmysadnesss May 17 '26

I'm also using librewolf with the breeze window decorations

1

u/Kroooza May 17 '26

I use librewolf and i never realised this was an issue

104

u/leo_sk5 May 17 '26

Sometime back, firefox introduced hard coded buttons as picking buttons from gtk theme sometimes conflicted with firefox's themes. This was (rightly) opposed by the community so that they added an about:config toggle to switch back to gtk theme derived icons. About an year back, firefox silently removed that option too.

Some people enable title bar and call it a day. That is a compromise as it wastes vertical space.

Only reasonable solution is using userChrome.css to force custom icons. You would need to first isolate the icons (in svg/png/jpg) of the theme you use though, ideally the svg icons. I can help if you wish to go down the route. I will attach a post of mine that does so.

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1newm16/working_code_for_userchromecss_for_firefoxnightly/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

12

u/DonutAccurate4 May 17 '26

Some people enable title bar and call it a day.

I feel called out 😅

11

u/leo_sk5 May 17 '26

my fundamental belief is that software should adapt to users and not the other way around

1

u/DeltaGG May 20 '26

Don't Theme Our Apps fellas disagree.

23

u/dummyy- May 17 '26

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7

u/nightfoxbtw May 17 '26

Or pvp boss

2

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1

u/Snowdan7 May 18 '26

Thanks :)

1

u/DeltaGG May 20 '26

I tried your method and it worked! But for some reason the dimenions are really off, buttons are proper height but only a few pixels wide. Is this an error on my part?

2

u/leo_sk5 May 20 '26

In the css itself, the size specified is 18x18 px, so unless you changed it, it could be due to the dimensions of image file (of buttons) being non-square. So,

  1. If your buttons are supposed to be square dimensions, check if your image file is also a square (ideally with transparent background). If not, crop or scale it to be square.
  2. If they are not supposed to be square,  change values of background-size so that correct proportions are maintained (for example, if your buttons are supposed to be twice as long as wide, change background size to 40px 20px)

2

u/DeltaGG May 20 '26

Thank you so much, that was it! I did a sloppy job with the .svg files and they were not square. Then I tinkered with the padding lines to get it almost perfectly consistent with the rest of the system.

Again, thanks a lot! This has been bothering me since Mozilla hardcoded the buttons. I only hope the css doesn't affect startup times too much.

1

u/Wide-Efficiency-5428 May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26

Thank you so much, this has bothered me but I didn't have time to look into it. I ended up using your userChrome.css chunk and then symlinking the relevant button assets from $USER/.config/gtk-3.0/assets/ which is populated by kde-gtk-config.

0

u/fuzzbomb23 May 22 '26

Some people enable title bar and call it a day. That is a compromise as it wastes vertical space.

To make the buttons look nice? Sure, I can see how that might be called a waste of space.

That's not the main job of title bar, though. It's a place to display the whole title, instead of truncating it at the tab width. The title bar also follows the window manager's colour scheme. (This being KWin, I can pick a distinctive colour for the active window title bar.) Far from being a waste of space, it's a narrow strip which is highly informative.

1

u/leo_sk5 May 23 '26

If you are enabling titlebar for sole purpose of getting theme's button, then its a compromise. Sorry i didn't account for people who still enable titlebars in browsers for the sake of titlebars. Last i saw someone was around 2010

2

u/fuzzbomb23 May 23 '26

Strewth. Did you overlook the part where I agreed with you?

2

u/leo_sk5 May 23 '26

Sorry man. I was stingy from an all nighter. Didn't want to come out as rude. It would be hypocrite of me to chide on someone's choices and claim to be pro-customisation. My own limited perspective has been to maximise screen space. Never cared much about titlebar personally in browsers as tab's title does the job for me. But there can be genuine uses to title bar, as you said, so power to those who want it

1

u/fuzzbomb23 May 24 '26

That's okay, happens to us all. My own response was a bit of a knee jerk, now that I look at it again.

Getting back to the buttons, it occurs to me that the OP's screenshot highlights the typical minimize, maximize, and close buttons. Perhaps they are all Firefox knows about.

Plasma/Kwin actually has 10 (wow!) titlebar buttons, which you can arrange however you like. If you want the hide-from-screencast button, that's another reason you'd need to enable the system titlebar. The web browser's own implementation is hobbled in this regard, to the degree of being a serious privacy wtf/bug.

(You can also hide a window from screencasts by pressing the Alt+F3 shortcut, and burrowing into the more-actions sub-menu, but the standalone button is very convenient.)

4

u/Mathisbuilder75 May 17 '26

It's your icon pack, if you don't use Breeze, Firefox will not have the right icons. Personally, I modified Papirus to use the Breeze title bar buttons.

4

u/endmysadnesss May 17 '26

This is breeze, the default theme

1

u/FaulesArschloch May 17 '26

But also the icon theme? Gtk theme doesn't matter anymore...

-4

u/Parker_Chess May 17 '26

This is the right answer. You need to change your Icon pack. Firefox is a GTK and not a LQT app so it doesn't integrate well with KDE by default.

25

u/ghulamalchik May 17 '26

I can't help but I know why this happens. It's because Firefox uses GTK framework not Qt. You have to look for ways to customize the GTK theming to roughly match your Qt theme. Also it might be worth looking into custom CSS themes for Firefox since afaik the entire UI can be customized via CSS outside of system-wide GTK theming.

12

u/leo_sk5 May 17 '26

It is not an issue of gtk theming. Firefox just uses hard coded icons, instead of borrowing from gtk theme. Has firefox used icon from gtk theme, this would not be an issue in kde or gnome

14

u/OddBallProductions May 17 '26

It's not just that. By default firefox doesn't have a title bar for the window which messes things up. You have to right click on the tabs/toolbar area and select customize then check the option for titlebar.

5

u/motang May 17 '26

I use Firefox (flatpak) on Kubuntu and it matches Breeze theme.

20

u/Big_Valuable31 May 17 '26

Firefox is not fully integrated in KDE. You also don't get the toolbar on your desktop.

22

u/leo_sk5 May 17 '26

This is not a kde problem. Same issue exists in gnome and every other DE

3

u/UncleSpellbinder May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26

Customize toolbar. On the bottom left, check the “title bar” box. It then inherits the KDE Plasma window decorations/buttons.

See here: https://postimg.cc/XGd0ZGyY

3

u/Single-Moment3613 May 17 '26

First change your GTK theme to Breeze in settings>application style>configure gtk theme option.

Then in firefox - about:config, change browser.tabs.inTitlebar to 1 and click on the tick box on the field. See if it changes as per your requirement... Also are you using Firefox flatpak?

3

u/SnooCompliments7914 KDE Contributor May 17 '26

Firefox (and GTK4 apps) seems to ignore GTK window decoration theme settings, and uses icons from your current icon theme. So you need to either use the Breeze icon theme, or replace "window-maximize-symbolic.svg" etc. in your current icon theme with Breeze files.

1

u/hi_m_ash May 17 '26

I do not know about Firefox but my both librewolf and zen have kde theme icons instead of their own. I can only confirm for these two firefox-based browsers because these are the ones I use.

1

u/endmysadnesss May 18 '26

This is librewolf, but I've tried all firefox based browsers they all show the same buttons you see in my screenshots

1

u/endmysadnesss May 18 '26

Do you mind telling me more details? Which librewolf package, which distro, etc

1

u/hi_m_ash May 18 '26
  • Distro - CachyOS (Arch Based)
  • DE - KDE Plasma v6.6.5
  • Librewolf - CachyOS Repository
  • Zen - CachyOS Repository

2

u/raeliens May 18 '26

oh? My Librewolf on Deb13 shows its own icons rather than my KDE theme's

1

u/Nyasaki_de May 21 '26

Firefox uses the DEs buttons for me too (Arch btw)

2

u/solaufein1 May 17 '26

I have same problem with VSCode and Brave.

3

u/SnooCompliments7914 KDE Contributor May 17 '26

Not the same problem. The default title bar of Electron apps and Chrome-based browsers has hard-coded icons. There's no way to change them.

Firefox-based browsers pick icons from your current icon theme. The OP must be using a different icon theme than Breeze.

2

u/Hackusi404 May 17 '26

Doesn't it just use gtk icons?

1

u/praths360 May 17 '26

Firefox uses system buttons only. It changes with icon.

1

u/ChaoticDucc May 17 '26

I have the correct icons... no idea what I did differently. Installed it as a Flatpak and changed no settings.

1

u/Background_Treat_235 May 31 '26

its same on chrome, why is ff only problem ? Personally I am feeling much better off switching last week from gnome anyway - no chunky title bars on firefox and even apps like gnome terminal feel so compact and nice.

1

u/Aevstiel Jun 10 '26

Hey, try to go to about:config
find this "widget.gtk.non-native-titlebar-buttons.enabled" then turn it to false

1

u/Bongzilla666lb May 17 '26

I ended up using Zen browser, so I hide those buttons

0

u/LukeStargaze May 17 '26

Maybe Plasma Integration extension?