1722063 - MacOS - New Firefox Modal Print Dialogue Does Not Support Dynamic Airprint Printers

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1666937

(Core :: Printing: Setup, defect, P2)

Description

[ken.winfield]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:90.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/90.0

Steps to reproduce:

Airprint is a hands-free always-works protocol that requires absolutely no setup beforehand on MacOS and iOS (though it will cache setups after the first print job for faster job processing next time). You can print for the first time, from the system print dialog, to Airprint printers on the local broadcast domain without any prior connection or setup.

To reproduce:
Open Firefox and navigate to a page with printable content.

Have an Airprint capable printer on the network which you have not yet set up or sent print jobs. Or, if you have already used your Airprint printer and it is therefor cached, first remove it from System Preferences -> Printers & Scanners, so that it defaults back to being a dynamic Airprint Printer.

Finally, attempt to print from Firefox. The Firefox print dialog will not contain the Airprint Printer. Click Print Using System Dialog, and almost instantly, the Airprint printer will populate in the Printers dropdown under Nearby Printers. Once you have printed to the Airprint printer, MacOS caches it, and it can then be used in the Firefox print dialog.

Actual results:

When printing as described in the steps to reproduce, local Airprint printers do not automatically populate in the list of available Destinations in the new Firefox modal print dialog. The list contains only previously configured printers, or if you have no previously configured printers, it contains only "Print to PDF".

To print to the local Airprint printers, I must first open the System Print Dialog, which is much faster and more stable. The MacOS System Print Dialogue populates the Airprint printers instantly and allows me to chose any on the local network as a destination. The Firefox print dialog does not support this, and is therefor more of a hindrance than a help to me and anyone else who relies on Airprint.

Expected results:

Airprint Printers on the local broadcast domain should dynamically populate in the Destination field of the Firefox modal print dialog, like they do in the system print dialog.

I manage a large telecommunications system for a massive multinational conglomerate with hundreds of sites and thousands of printers. The vast majority of those printers support Airprint and the corporate subnets are set up to allow Airprinting across subnets in each site, to facilitate seamless print functionality from our sites' iPads and the managements' MacBooks, regardless of where those devices came from and who is using them.

I travel between these sites frequently, and when I need to print things (many times per day) I just go to the print dialog and select the printer labeled with the room number closest to me and print. It would take years to add them all manually, and 10+ minutes to manually add each device I'm going to use.

I had to turn off the Firefox print dialog in about:config, since it does not work at all for me due to lack of Airprint support, and even if it is fixed so that it supports Airprint, it lacks critical functionality such advanced Layout and Paper Handling options, which are available in the MacOS print dialog.

This problem does not occur in Firefox for iOS, since unlike Firefox for Mac, Firefox for iOS is forced to use the system print dialog.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Core::Printing: Setup' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please revert this change in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Emily, not sure if this ties into the cups printer work that you did; maybe you could take a look when you've got cycles? (Maybe we need a "found a new network printer" event that we can receive and dynamically update the printer list without blocking the user.)

(Emilio said he's interested in working/collaborating on this too, if you'd prefer.)

Comment 3

[Jonathan Watt [:jwatt]]

Some bugs that may be worth reviewing before tackling this:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?bug_id=1666937,1667978,1663920,1668962,1658414,1695552,439904

(In reply to Daniel Holbert [:dholbert] from comment #2)

(Maybe we need a "found a new network printer" event that we can receive and dynamically update the printer list without blocking the user.)

We discussed this at some point but wanted accompanying frontend work to display some sort of throbber (possibly just a throbbing ellipsis) in the 'Destinations' dropdown. Without that the user is likely to look at the list then close it, and assume that the printers they saw are the only ones that will be listed and that Firefox can't print to the one they want.

Comment 4

[Emily McDonough [:alaskanemily]]

I believe this be covered by bug 1666937. If Airprint isn't using Bonjour/mDNS, we ought to add it to that bug I think.

Comment 5

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Let's call this a dupe of bug 1666937.

Comment 6

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

I've marked the dupe-target as blocking bug 1702501, so we can remove that relationship from this bug.