463286 - Implement full support for using D-Bus in Mozilla platform

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core :: IPC, defect)

Description

[Damjan Georgievski]

D-Bus is the common desktop IPC on Linux now (KDE4 uses it exclusivelly, Gnome apps mostly are, others are catching up). It can be used for a lot of things, like:
 - sending notifications to other programs (like when a download is finished)
 - querying other desktop services (Firefox quieries netwok-manager now)

http://dbus.freedesktop.org


For example, I would like to see a full netwok-manager frontend made like an Firefox extension. It would replace the standard "you are offline" page with a choice to connect to some wifi etc.

Also, Firefox could start to use Avahi (over D-Bus) so that it shows Zeroconf bookmarks announced by different appliances, devices and applications (cameras, printers etc).

It could use D-Bus and the notifier desktop service to display notifications about download progress etc. (and that will integrate with the desktop).

BTW, there's some work done on this already  http://rdr.to/ym (google groups), I propose to make this a builtin feature in the Mozilla platform.

PS.
If there's already a bug on this issue, I couldn't find it. The proper name for D-Bus is "D-Bus".

Comment 1

[Damjan Georgievski]

Aditionally, as a second stage, Firefox could export some of it's internals via D-Bus, and can use it instead of the .lock file in the profile, and to instruct it to open new urls etc..

Comment 2

[Matěj Cepl]

And of course with exporting some useful methods via d-bus we can do some cool stuff á la http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awa0bhzT6W0