1867064 - Firefox doesn't follow symlinks when checking for default browser

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Shell Integration, defect, P3)

Description

[David Turner]

Steps to reproduce:

• Start on Debian bookworm with Firefox installed systemwide and x-www-browser set to /usr/bin/firefox using update-alternatives
• Create x-www-browser.desktop in /usr/share/applications/ containing the following

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Preferred Browser
TryExec=/usr/bin/x-www-browser
Exec=x-www-browser %U
Terminal=false
StartupNotify=true
NoDisplay=true
MimeType=text/html;text/xml;application/xml;application/xhtml+xml;application/xhtml_xml;x-scheme-handler/http;x-scheme-handler/https

• xdg-settings set default-web-browser x-www-browser.desktop
• Now, start Firefox and look in Settings to see if it thinks it's the default browser

Actual results:

Firefox says it isn't the default browser

Expected results:

Firefox is the default browser. It thinks it isn't because /usr/bin/x-www-browser is not /usr/bin/firefox. But /usr/bin/x-www-browser is a symlink to /etc/alternatives/x-www-browser which is a symlink to /usr/bin/firefox.

When working out what the current default browser is, Firefox should follow symlinks (probably in nsGNOMEShellService::KeyMatchesAppName() in browser/components/shell/nsGNOMEShellService.cpp). For this case to work it would have to follow multiple levels of symlinks.

Comment 1

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

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

Comment 2

[Negritas Sergiu, Desktop QA]

Hello! I have tried to reproduce the issue with firefox 122.0a1(2023-12-08) on Ubuntu 22.04, unfortunately I wasn't able to reproduce the issue on my end.
Could you please answer the following questions in order to further investigate this isssue.

1. Does this issue happen with a new profile? Here is a link on how to create one: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-remove-switch-firefox-profiles
2. Does this issue happen in the latest nightly? Here is a link from where you can download it: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/
3. Do you have any addons installed? If yes could you please list them?

Comment 3

[Robin Steuber (she/her) [:bytesized]]

Since we never got a response to comment 2, I'm going to go ahead and close this. We can reopen it if we get one.