F40 Change Proposal: Change Firefox Desktop File (System-Wide)

Project Discussion Change Proposals
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Change Firefox desktop file

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Announced

This is a proposed Change for Fedora Linux.
This document represents a proposed Change. As part of the Changes process, proposals are publicly announced in order to receive community feedback. This proposal will only be implemented if approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee.

:link: Summary

Recent Firefox desktop file (firefox.desktop) does not comply with DBus/Gnome search provider rules thus Firefox can’t provide DBus Gnome search service.

We should change Firefox desktop file from firefox.desktop to org.mozilla.firefox.desktop.

:link: Owner

:link: Detailed Description

Firefox needs to provide desktop file in expected format to pair DBus service and Gnome search service together to make Gnome search service work.

:link: Feedback

:link: Benefit to Fedora

We’ll fix already broken feature.

:link: Scope

  • Proposal owners:

Desktop file name is changed in Firefox 121.0.

  • Other developers:

Fedora Workstation needs update Firefox desktop name (hardcoded in gnome-shell) to correctly place Firefox to Gnome taskbar as default application.

No need to coordinate with rel-eng.

  • Policies and guidelines: N/A (not needed for this Change)

  • Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)

  • Alignment with Community Initiatives:

:link: Upgrade/compatibility impact

Should not impact.

:link: How To Test

  1. Open Firefox 2) Type something to Gnome search 3) It works

Test also KDE/Plasma it doesn’t crash (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2017123)

:link: User Experience

Enabled Gnome shell search provider for Firefox.

:link: Dependencies

None

:link: Contingency Plan

  • Revert desktop file name change in Firefox package.
  • Blocks release? No

:link: Documentation

:link: Release Notes

2

We’ll likely have to update things in KDE as well. CC @ngompa

3

Wait, why is this hardcoded? This is silly and is just asking for trouble.

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This also affects Fedora’s flatpak, which is currently ID’ed as org.mozilla.Firefox (with an upper-case ‘F’) due to historical baggage. This is fixable but needs to be coordinated with the Flatpak SIG. /cc @kalev

2 Likes
5

This is about the default favorite apps list in the dash. How could the app ID not be hardcoded?

https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/gnome-shell/c/624402d89fb87278d44bde20f9fba7883adc5d90

@stransky BTW, I think there’s a mistake in that commit:

 - +    'mozilla-firefox.desktop': 'firefox.desktop',
 + +    'mozilla-firefox.desktop': 'org.mozilla.firefox.desktop',

The new left side should be 'firefox.desktop' so we change that to the new name. mozilla-firefox.desktop was last used circa F17, so that could just be dropped.

6

In KDE we use preferred://browser instead of explicitly setting it to Firefox:

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This change proposal has now been submitted to FESCo with ticket #3134 for voting.

To find out more, please visit our Changes Policy documentation.

8

Closing change proposals for F40. The ship has sailed. Of course we can still discuss if needed, but please open new topics for that.