1745437 - App execution alias for the Mozilla Firefox on Microsoft Store

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Installer, enhancement, P3)

Description

[João Paulo]

Attachment: Screenshots.gif

Steps to reproduce:

On Windows 10:

1. Without any Mozilla Firefox version installed, go to the Microsoft Store and install Firefox from there.
2. Press Win+R (to open the Run dialog box) and type "firefox.exe", then press enter.

Actual results:

Windows complains it couldn't find "firefox.exe". Whitout it, I can't run the Profile Manager using "firefox.exe -p" on the command line (or run using any other command line arguments).

Expected results:

Firefox should have been started. Also, the screen at Settings, Apps, App execution aliases, should have Firefox listed there (see the screenshots attached).

Comment 1

[João Paulo]

I think the following pages might help the developers:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/schemas/appxpackage/uapmanifestschema/element-uap3-appexecutionalias
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/desktop/modernize/desktop-to-uwp-extensions

Comment 2

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

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

Comment 3

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

Thanks for the excellent report! I wasn't aware of these App execution aliases, and I agree that we should set one. We have seen other situations where launching firefox.exe somewhat directly (from PowerShell, say) can cause the app package bubble to get confused; I wonder if this is related?

Assigning to :bhearsum, who will actually do the work. Thanks again, João!

Comment 4

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

Attachment: Bug 1745437: Add an app execution alias for MSIX packages. r?nalexander!

This allows MSIX-installed Firefox to be launched through Win+r and Powershell (and probably other places). This feels deceptively simple - but it appears to work.

Comment 5

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/410fa75c2831
Add an app execution alias for MSIX packages. r=nalexander

Comment 7

[Atila Butkovits]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/410fa75c2831

Comment 8

[Catalin Sasca, Desktop Test Engineering [:csasca]]

Verified on two different systems with Nightly 98.0a1 (2022-01-13) on Windows 10 and 11 that Firefox is shown in the App aliases list and can be run as well by the run prompt.

Comment 9

[github]

is there any chance of backporting this to 96/the current windows store version ? or do we have to wait until march for the release there?

thank you
adam

Comment 10

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

(In reply to github from comment #9)

is there any chance of backporting this to 96/the current windows store version ? or do we have to wait until march for the release there?

thank you
adam

There's definitely no chance of it getting into 96 (we already shipped that). I don't think we can backport to 97 at this point either. It will be on Firefox Beta in a couple of weeks time though.