196238 - GTK, GTK2 initialize X properties to "mozilla-bin"

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: XUL, defect)

Description

[Kenneth Herron]

The GTK+ toolkit initializes several values from the name of the program, e.g.
"/path/to/mozilla-bin". Specifically the following items are based on argv[0]:

* The WM_CLASS for the application top-level window. The gnome-panel window list
(taskbar) utility uses this for the button label when it groups several windows
under one task button.

* The initial WM_CLASS for other windows opened by mozilla. There are bugs about
setting WM_CLASS for new windows (see bug 29856 and bug 194299), but the patches
submitted so far don't catch all cases, e.g. alert windows.

* The WM_COMMAND property for the top-level window. This is the command a
session manager could use to restart mozilla. It's set to
"/path/to/mozilla-bin", which is wrong since mozilla should be launched through
a frontend.

Mozilla should use the application's canonical name, i.e. "mozilla", for these
things, and supply a useful command to WM_COMMAND.

How to reproduce:

1) The app's top-level window isn't a visible window. To inspect it, run
"xlsclients -l" and look for the mozilla entry. It should look something like
the following:

    Window 0x5800001:
      Machine:  piggies
      Command:  /opt/mozilla/mozilla-bin
      Instance/Class:  mozilla-bin/Mozilla-bin

2) You can then run xprop on the window if you like: 

    $ xprop -id 0x5800001
    WM_LOCALE_NAME(STRING) = "C"
    WM_CLASS(STRING) = "mozilla-bin", "Mozilla-bin"
    WM_CLIENT_MACHINE(STRING) = "piggies"
    WM_COMMAND(STRING) = { "/opt/mozilla/mozilla-bin" }

3) Launch mozilla under gnome, using a gnome-panel running the window list
applet. Once mozilla is launched, open several windows with ctrl-N. The window
list applet will eventually coalesce all of the mozilla windows under a single
button labelled "Mozilla-bin". I believe this label comes from the top-level
window's WM_CLASS.

See also the Inter-client conventions manual at
<http://tronche.com/gui/x/icccm/>. WM_CLASS is discussed in section 4.
WM_COMMAND is in appendix C (obsolete properties) but since GTK+ sets it,
mozilla should try to make the value useful.

Comment 1

[Kenneth Herron]

Attachment: Set argv[0] to the name of the launcher

This patch makes two changes:

1) Inside the "mozilla" script, set MOZ_LAUNCHER to the argv[0] used to launch
the script.

2) Inside mozilla-bin's main(), replace argv[0] with the value of MOZ_LAUNCHER
just before calling gtk_init(). This causes gtk to initialize based on the name
of the frontend rather than the incidental name of the final executable.

Comment 2

[Kenneth Herron]

See also bug 192263. The issue described there is probably KDE storing the
useless WM_COMMAND value, then later trying to use it to restart mozilla.

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

to Chris

Comment 4

[Greg Ubben]

Also same as bug 180319, BTW.

Comment 5

[Andrew Schultz]

Comment on attachment 116480 [details] [diff] [review]
Set argv[0] to the name of the launcher

relevant code lives in toolkit now (xpfe/bootstrap is going away on trunk)

Comment 6

[Jonathan Watt [:jwatt]]

Closing GTK2 related bugs since we removed GTK2 support at the beginning of 2018 in bug 1278282. Probably best to open a new bug in the unlikely event that any of these are still relevant.