1656249 - Menus no more shown in global menu of Unity desktop on Ubuntu 20.04

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Widget: Gtk, defect)

Description

[Ulf Zibis]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0

Steps to reproduce:

Using standard version of FF and Unity desktop from Ubuntu 20.04 repository.
Using standard version of Thunderbird and Unity desktop from Ubuntu 20.04 repository.

Actual results:

Neither the web site title nor the menu on mouse hover appears.
This bug applies to Firefox and Thunderbird, maybe to all Mozilla Products.

Expected results:

It should work like it was with Ubuntu 18.04 for FF and TB.

Comment 1

[Adrian Wilkins]

This is because Canonical/Ubuntu used to patch TB and FF for appmenu support, but now they no longer do this because they don't support Unity as a desktop any more, more broadly, because GNOME shell developers don't support the idea of a global menu (which I find frustrating).

KDE Plasma remains as the most popular desktop environment that has a global menu option ; AFAIK it doesn't work there either (without patches). [1]

AFAIR this used to be possible to implement with an extension, but I think the changes to FF / TB APIs broke all of these and may have also made this impossible, hence the patches to the executables.

In this bug [2] Canonical state they are no longer patching Firefox, I expect the same is true of Thunderbird

TLDR : it became too onerous for the only distro shipping global menu because of internal API changes in the Mozilla code. The most practical way to get this back would be for the Mozilla codebase to support it, as they know their code the best it would mean distros not having to patch it extensively to get this feature that is (sadly) a minority concern now.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/dvyf39/kde_global_menu_not_working_only_in_firefox_and/
[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/1859123

Comment 2

[Virginia (please send need info request to Brindusa Tot)]

Hi,

Thank you for your comments.

I'll add this ticket to the "Core: Widget GTK" component in case someone from their team would like to loop in and add any comment.

Regards,
Virginia