I’m on Fedora Silverblue 44, and to save me from the troubles of having to layer the necessary packages for the Video Codecs to work, I just started using the Flathub version of Firefox instead of the RPM sourced one.
Now, the problem is that every time that I click on a notification from the browser, a new RPM Firefox window is spawned, and this is bothering me.
I already tried to hide the rpm version as suggested here, but the issue still persists.
How could i troubleshoot this problem? Thanks in advance.
Apart from that, please check if rpm firefox is still selected as the default web-browser in your desktop settings. If so, try to choose the flatpak one instead.
From what I’ve read from this actual forum the usual advice is not to remove that RPM version but to just “hide it”.
If I didn’t figure out the problem in about an hour I think I will just go on with your proposed solution.
I think that the main reason this behavior happens is that both the rpm and the flathub app share the same app id. I tried to lookup the desktop entries but I only found one…
I would really to know what command get executed when I click on the system notification that triggers firefox to spawn a new instance.
The hide tip in the docs copies the RPM’s org.mozilla.firefox.desktop, which has the same name as the Flatpak’s entry, so a notification click is likely launching that copy. Run grep -H '^Exec' /usr/local/share/applications/org.mozilla.firefox.desktop /var/lib/flatpak/exports/share/applications/org.mozilla.firefox.desktop to see the command each one runs (use ~/.local/share/applications for the first path if you used the per-user method). I’d replace every Exec= line in your hidden copy with the matching line from the Flatpak’s file, then run sudo update-desktop-database /usr/local/share/applications.
Isn’t it hidden by default once you install Firefox from flathub? When I’m using Kinoite and install from flathub, everything launches the correct version (even notifications)
Right now I tried the solution proposed from @bluesadam and I have to say that everything is working fine… I will reinstall firefox to try to recreate the problem and try out this tip, thanks!
Notifications work “fine”, they redirect me to the right tab when I click on them, but they also spawn a new instance of the RPM Firefox… bizarre behavior.
I have removed (rpm-ostree override remove <package>) the Firefox RPM package on my Silverblue systems instead of hiding it for the same reason (clicking notifications from this Discourse instance brought up the RPM version).
While OSTree overrides are not recommended to be long-lasting, I have experienced no issues even after several version upgrades.