1414732 - Firefox won't utilize xdg-open to parse custom uris

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: File Handling, defect, P3)

Description

[kuklinster]

Attachment: Képernyőkép – 2017-11-06 08-48-41.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
Build ID: 20171003144318

Steps to reproduce:

Attempted to use/resolve some custom uris by clicking on them (apt:, magnet:, my-custom-whatever:)



Actual results:

Got an error message: Firefox does not know how to open this address (apt:).



Expected results:

Since Chromium and xdg-open on itself can handle all the uris I attempted to use with Firefox, I expected to get a popup prompting me to select which application do I wish to utilize to handle the uri in question.

The bug occurs on Linux Mint 18.2 and is basically (if not exactly) the same as the one asked here:
https://support.mozilla.org/questions/1175051

What's strange, is that in a virtual machine, running a live cd session of Linux Mint 18.2, upgraded to Firefox 56.0, it works; that is, I'm not sure how to reproduce this behavior. This discovery made me reinstall my development machine (assuming that I've broken something recently); once I was done with that, I've applied an Ansible configuration to this computer (which does not seem to affect Firefox in any way, as it only installs some useful software and spreads some configuration files), have done a dist-upgrade, and at this point the uris do not work again, just as described in the beginning.

Since there is at least one other person affected with this problem it looks me plausible that there is something misbehaving in Firefox.

If there's a way to gather additional logs or any further information, I'm happy to provide more details.

Comment 1

[Jon Raphaelson]

This is also happening to me, though I haven't seen it flap as mentioned above.

Version 	58.0b1
Build ID 	20171103003834
Update Channel 	aurora
User Agent 	Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:58.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/58.0
OS 	        Linux 4.13.9-1-ARCH

https://s8.postimg.org/as09j01yt/ff58-org-protocol.png

https://s8.postimg.org/wefa040k5/ff58-org-protocol-xdg-open-works.png

$ xdg-mime query default x-scheme-handler/org-protocol
org-protocol.desktop

Also happy to get more information.

Comment 2

[numbchild]

I have same issue too.
Same with @Jon

Comment 3

[adam]

This appears to be resolved in Fedora 27 on version firefox-58.0-3.fc27.x86_64

Comment 4

[Jed Davis [:jld] ⟨⏰|UTC-7⟩ ⟦he/him⟧]

I ran into a problem like this (with the zoommtg scheme) recently, and the cause turned out to be that I was missing the desktop-file-utils package that provides and runs update-desktop-database. (This was on Debian, but I notice that Fedora uses the same package name.)

The xdg-mime query default command suggested in comment #1 did find the association for me even without that package, because it's a shell script that appears to just scrape the *.desktop files, but the code in glib requires the cache files created by update-desktop-database.

I'm going to tentatively mark the bug as fixed, but this isn't my component so feel free to reopen (or ask to reopen) if other people are still seeing it.