1758770 - investigate pinning private browsing icon to taskbar in MSIX packaged builds

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Installer, enhancement, P3)

Description

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

We added support for pinning a shortcut to Firefox Private Browsing mode in bug 1750991. Unfortunately, this method does not work for MSIX packaged builds.

We have a related bug on file about general pinning support for MSIX (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1712628). The API it suggests using will likely not work here -- as it does not allow for anything but pinning the current running app (which would mean there's no way to specify that it should start in private browsing mode).

There is a related API about pinning a SecondaryTile that may be useful. At least one of the SecondaryTile constructors takes an arguments option that seems like it might let us either directly or indirectly launch with -private-window. It's not clear to me if this is actually a list of command line arguments or some other thing that needs something that maps them in the AppxManifest.xml file.

Another potential avenue here is to look into adding another <Application> entry to the AppxManifest, and trying to create a shortcut to it, and pin that through the existing means. I have a patch that dose the first part of this -- which actually automatically shows it in the Start Menu, and can be pinned to Taskbar.

It certainly seems like this should be possible in one way or another.

Comment 1

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

Attachment: WIP: Bug 1758770: Support Private Browsing shortcut in MSIX

As it stands, this patch should allow Firefox to be launched directly in Private Browsing mode, and adds a Tile to the Start Menu.

The protocol handler bits probably aren't needed at this point, since we decided not to support Private Browsing as the default browser.

Comment 2

[Nick Rishel [:nrishel]]

desktop7:shortcut may also work here, looks like we can specify an argument.

Comment 3

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

(In reply to Nick Rishel [:nrishel] from comment #2)

desktop7:shortcut may also work here, looks like we can specify an argument.

We should double check if we can pin both indepently. IIRC, a second <Application> will have a separate AUMID. I don't know what will happen with a shortcut.

Comment 4

[Nick Rishel [:nrishel]]

Ah right, I forgot about the branding problem.

Comment 6

[Nipun Shukla]

One probable consequence of this is that private browser pinning on MSIX is fundamentally broken. If you download Firefox from the Windows Store, open a private window (with separation), and attempt to pin it by right clicking on the taskbar icon you'll see that the icon switches back to the regular Firefox icon even though it's a private window. For some reason if I repeatedly pin and unpin, I'll sometimes get the right icon, but that's quite uncommon.