266230 - disable "set wallpaper" on non-GNOME environments

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 526717

(Firefox :: Shell Integration, defect)

Description

[Erno Kuusela]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8a5) Gecko/20041026 Firefox/0.9.1+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8a5) Gecko/20041026 Firefox/0.9.1+

"Set wallpaper" does nothing in X11.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Select "Set as wallpaper..." from the context menu when hovering over an image.
2. Click "Set wallpaper" in the ensuing dialog.


Actual Results:  
Nothing happens.

Expected Results:  
X root window is endowed with the image of my choosing.

gconfd seems to get launched when i try to set the background. Maybe firefox
is trying to do some sort of Gnome magic. I don't use Gnome, just regular X
(window manager + xterms).

Comment 1

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

yeah, its using GNOME magic, just like all of the shell integration bits tend
towards.  Its a tradeoff, you can try to be really platform-independent, or you
can integrate with specific platforms much tighter.  Its a better user
experience to do the latter, in most cases.

Comment 2

[Erno Kuusela]

(In reply to comment #1)

Any chance of only showing the menu item when running GNOME? I bet there are
lots of (more?) users who run another desktop environment or just standard X.

I'd like to see firefox stay usable without GNOME, and it seems like
questionable precedent if this is left like this.

Comment 3

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

"when running GNOME" is pretty tricky to define at present.

A run-time check would be a good thing, but probably not going to happen in time
for 1.0.

Comment 4

[Nilson Cain]

I filed bug 291525 which is similar to this one, except I think that the feature
should be removed.

There are just too many ways to set the wallpaper. Different things do it
different ways. A lot of minimal window managers just use xsetbg which changes
the background of the root window, while most of the bigger environments use an
overlay on that.

I'm going to change the bug to NEW because I do see this as a valid issue.