1606247 - Show SSBs as separate taskbar items on Linux

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: General, enhancement, P5)

Description

[A Shevchuk]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0

Steps to reproduce:

Consider following .desktop files:

cat example-web-app-1.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Example Web App #1
Icon=/home/x/.local/share/icons/web-apps/example-1.png
Exec=/opt/firefox/firefox -P apps -ssb https://example.com/1 --class=web-app-example-1
StartupWMClass=web-app-example-1
Type=Application

cat example-web-app-2.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Example Web App #2
Icon=/home/x/.local/share/icons/web-apps/example-2.png
Exec=/opt/firefox/firefox -P apps -ssb https://example.com/2 --class=web-app-example-2
StartupWMClass=web-app-example-2
Type=Application

Actual results:

Two web apps get grouped on the taskbar, second web app window class and icon being ignored.

To workaround this, one has to use separate profiles for each web app.

Expected results:

Second web app window class and icon should not be ignored, different web apps should not be grouped on the taskbar.

See also the same issue for Windows: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1602195

Comment 1

[A Shevchuk]

Messed formatting a bit, sorry, didn't realize input supported markdown. Also, it automatically added my UA (FF68), as I'm writing from it, but issue is really about FF73.

Comment 2

[landtuna]

Using xprop on it shows that its WM_CLASS is "Navigator", "Firefox". I found that I can get a Firefox window with a different class by running firefox --new-instance -P default --class web-app-example-2, but adding --ssb to the command line doesn't launch it as an SSB unless I remove the other options. It seems that --ssb has to live by itself.

Comment 3

[matfantinel]

I'd like to add that Peppermint OS' Ice application successfully creates SSBs with Firefox with a separate taskbar item. It runs firefox --class ICE-SSB-twitterice --profile /home/$USER/.local/share/ice/firefox/twitterice --no-remote https://twitter.com.

The downside of using it is that it doesn't open external links in the "regular" browser window. Seems like the main issue is that Firefox cannot set different WM_CLASS if the instances have the same profile, and SSBs with an unique profile cannot access the regular window.

Comment 4

[landtuna]

@matfantinel - that command line doesn't have --ssb as an argument, so it shows up with a tab bar. So I think it's not an SSB?

Comment 5

[landtuna]

@matfantinel - oops - I misunderstood. I guess Ice is a wrapper that circumvents --ssb and applies its own styles to a browser?

Comment 6

[matfantinel]

Oops - you're right. I think it used to use --ssb at some point? That's how it's called in Ice at least. But yeah, indeed what it does is create a new profile that hides the FF UI and only keeps the titlebar. So it's not a SSB

Comment 7

[:Gijs (he/him)]

The SSB code was removed.