275706 - Firefox does not identify itself correctly to iListen voice rec application (Firefox.app vs firefox-bin ?)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Disability Access, defect)

Description

[Chris Andrichak]

IListen is the only currently developed and supported voice recognition
application on Macintosh, and is 
very useful to those of us who cannot type for various reasons.

In iListen you can create custom command sets for applications, and iListen
recognizes when and 
application has been started and activates its respective command set. You can
create a command set 
for Thunderbird, but iListen does not then recognize when the application has
been started and so does 
not ever activate its command set. The iListen developers have this to say:

"We detect that a program is running by a notification from the 
operating system of a "Application Switched" event. We get the 
program's PSN from the event, then from that we get the PSN 
information record. That record has the application's name. We use 
that name to match against the available application-specific command 
sets. If we find a match, then that command set is loaded.

The program name must exactly match the command set name. Now Mac OS 
X likes to hide parts of the name - the extension. So that program 
might really be called "Thunderbird.app", but you see "Thunderbird".

If we can't get a program name because the application does not have 
a PSN (process serial number) or a corresponding PSN information 
record, we can't load the command set."


Mozilla and Thunderbird have the same problem, but Camino does not.
related Thunderbird bug: 273977

Comment 1

[Chris Andrichak]

substitute Firefox for Thunderbird in the original description, I basically
filed the same bug for each product.

Comment 2

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

This is probably a packaging issue. Do Firefox/TBird have Info.plist files with
all the require entries?

Comment 3

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

Or, maybe there's a mismatch between the executable name and the package name
that confuses iListen?

Comment 4

[Chris Andrichak]

Changing the name of the executable inside the package to Thunderbird (from thunderbird-bin) and 
changing the info.plist file to match that makes the application not launch, so I am assuming there 
other reference/packaging issues that need to be addressed, but my thought was that it might be just a 
packaging issue.

Comment 5

[Chris Andrichak]

Sorry, I got confused between bugs again. Some back story. The Firefox build that I have has two 
internal executables:
firefox and firefox-bin
the first one is quite small and already matches the package name, so I assume it is just some sort of 
launching application. It also means I cannot rename the "-bin" application to have the same name and 
match the name of the package. Hence I tried it with Thunderbird, and was not successful.

Comment 6

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

"firefox" is actually a shell script.

Comment 7

[Chris Andrichak]

(In reply to comment #6)
> "firefox" is actually a shell script.

I managed to hack it and make it work, but I am not quite sure what the real fix should be.
Basically, if I change the name of the actual Firefox executable from "Firefox-bin" to "Firefox" and run 
the program by double clicking on that executable from within the package, iListen recognizes the 
application and will load its command set.

I could not figure out how out to change the shell script to launch the renamed executable. I renamed 
the shell script and then hard wired the new executable name into it (figure out the text manipulation 
later) and changed the info.list file, but the entire program would not launch.

Comment 8

[Josh Aas]

taking as I doubt blake is going to look into this

Comment 9

[Josh Aas]

Just a note that we get this warning in the console when launching Firefox on
Mac OS X at least sometimes...

Warning: unrecognized command line flag -psn_0_11272193

I'll investigate it more when I am working on this bug again.

Comment 10

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

When you launch an app from the Finder, it adds a -psn argument. Our command
line args handler should just ignore this.

Comment 11

[Asaf Romano (gone)]

looking at info.plist, it seems we don't use the firefox shell script at all,
shoudn't we exclude the *nix script on mac?

Comment 12

[Mark Mentovai]

We should exclude the firefox script on the Mac (as is already done in Thunderbird).  We should also get rid of run-mozilla.sh in all products.  See related comments at bug 273977 comment 6.

Comment 13

[Benjamin Smedberg]

I think we need to keep putting run-mozilla.sh in dist/bin so that we can run the command-line test apps, though there's no reason to put it in the application bundle.

Comment 14

[Chris Andrichak]

Attachment: a small part of this, for tinderbox (from bug 273977)

when this is fixed in the app, this will need to be changed in tinderbox

Comment 16

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

What's the current status of this bug?

Comment 17

[Chris Andrichak]

I'm (fortunately) not an iListen user anymore, so it's not really on my radar. Fixing this doesn't technically require iListen, though.

This was resolved as WONTFIX over in the related TBird bug 273977 (there's an incomplete patch with more in it in that bug, too).