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If you want to avoid GTK3 and you're on Arch, there's a firefox-gtk2 [0] AUR package that compiles Firefox against GTK2 only.

[0]: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/firefox-gtk2

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My local cairo-gtk2 build of Firefox 49 reliably crashes anytime you try to use the GTK file dialog. Does it work for you (arch or gentoo)?

After almost a decade of building Firefox from source I finally bit the bullet to switch to a precompiled binary last month. It's fixed all the issues that have started to crop up but leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

I had been using their binaries due to security updates and having to build at inopportune times for an hour or three (depending on machine), but like I wrote in a sibling comment, enabling the cairo-gtk2 backend resulted in crashes when trying to select a file with the gtk file dialog. So I bit the bullet and am struggling with the drawing regressions of GTK3.

That's interesting. I've been happily using firefox-gtk2 and it's been working quite reliably.

Not only I haven't had any issues with it so far, it even looks better than Arch's official package (that's built with gtk3).

The issues have been present with gtk >= 3.20, and they should be fixed with release 50 and 51:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1266914

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1264079

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