499904 - Fennec should offer to be the default browser on Maemo

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Uwe Kaminski]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.9.0.11) Gecko/2009060215 Firefox/3.0.11 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Maemo 4.3.1 (5-2008.43-7)

This question was discussed between community members and Nokia developer in the IRC (see Link above)

The thread in the community forum is located there:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=298893#post298893

What should be done to provide the possibility to make fennec the default browser.

Reproducible: Always




If this place the wrong one of enhancement requests like this one please tell me where to ask instead of this.

Comment 1

[Uwe Kaminski]

Here is the description of a workaround to make fennec the default browser:
http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=316046&postcount=16

There are only two small issues:

1. After booting my tablet I have to do the action which opens the browser for two times. But after opening fennec the first time after a reboot I can open it with one click every time I want.

2. Every time I open fennec it starts as a new application. It would be better for the memory if a new window opens in a new tab.

How I could start fennec from command line to ad an URL to the running fennec application as a new tab inside of it?

Comment 2

[Ben Combee (:bcombee)]

There's a browser-proxy python script that's maintained at http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=304298&postcount=566 that lets uses dispatch browser requests to MicroB, tear, or Fennec.  We'll probably need to adopt a similar solution.

Comment 3

[Ben Combee (:bcombee)]

The script uses python, but it's short enough that it could be reimplemented as C++ code using the glib DBUS bindings.

Comment 4

[Ben Combee (:bcombee)]

OK, better approach is to handle the DBUS hookup as part of our native code in nsIPhoneSupport.cpp.  Then, provide an alternate com.nokia.osso_browser.service file in a separate .deb file that is dependent on Fennec's package.  If you uninstall Fennec, this will also go away and that will restore the original version.

Comment 5

[Ben Combee (:bcombee)]

We need to register as service "com.nokia.osso_browser" and handle requests for "load_url", "mime_open", "open_new_window", and "top_application".

See http://xio.com/maemo/browser-proxy.txt for python code that does this.

Comment 6

[Ben Combee (:bcombee)]

Looked into extending nsIPhoneSupport, and hit a problem with getting code to register well there.  I looked into extending the DBus message support already used for Network Manager, but that code only supported one client object.  So, I'm shifting back into having a small external program that can register as the service similar to the proxy script, but in C instead of python.  I've already tested launching Fennec from command line; it works, but right now it opens a new top-level window instead of a new tab.  We need bug 529576 to land to get the new tab opening working.

Comment 7

[Ben Combee (:bcombee)]

Attachment: source and makefile for separately installed dbus client

Comment 8

[Ben Combee (:bcombee)]

Attachment: binary DEB that can be installed on device to make Fennec the default browser, reboot may be required after install

Comment 9

[Ben Combee (:bcombee)]

The Maemo environment has to be restarted to get the dbus-daemon to reread the service files, unfortunately.  I've played with stopping and starting the dbus service from the postinst script, but the methods I've found for doing that kill the runtime environment.  There's no way to get the daemon to reread the config files without stopping it, and stopping it kills the window manager.

Comment 10

[Steven Luo]

(In reply to comment #9)
> The Maemo environment has to be restarted to get the dbus-daemon to reread the
> service files, unfortunately.

I haven't had any such problems (at least on install) with my packaging for the Python script (see http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=406786&postcount=1029).  I'm shipping the .service file in the package itself and dpkg-diverting the file provided by tablet-browser-ui out of the way in the preinst, though I can't see how that differs from what you're doing from dbus's perspective.

At worst, sending dbus-daemon SIGHUP seems to get it to pick up the changes in the .service files, and that's what I'm doing on uninstall.

Doing this in C is presumably a BIG performance win, since Python needs ~2 seconds just to start up on my N800, but I wonder whether a Fennec-specific approach is the right way to go.  The Python script's grown a config file, with the eventual goal being a control panel or other UI to select the default browser ...

Comment 11

[Uwe Kaminski]

I also use the python script but I think there is one point missing:

It's impossible to open a URL in a new tab instead of a new window. I'll fill a new bug for this special feature request.

Comment 12

[Uwe Kaminski]

As I tried a few seconds ago every it IS already possible to open a new URL in a new tab!

Simply enter in xterm:
$ fennec http://maemo.org

and then:
$ fennec http://mozilla.org

You'll see both sites in different tabs.

Sorry for the noise :)

Comment 13

[Ben Combee (:bcombee)]

Uwe, we were opening in a new window, but a patch that landed last week fixed that problem.

Steven, I considered adding support for other browsers to the proxy, but didn't have them to test and wanted to get something done.  I wasn't able to get my N900 to recognize the changes after SIGHUPing the daemon, and the dbus-daemon documentation says that it only reads files on startup.

Comment 14

[Joe Drew (not getting mail)]

This should probably block - using Fennec on the N900 is pretty hard when everything launches microb.

Comment 16

[Ben Combee (:bcombee)]

There's another nice solution at http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=38273

Comment 17

[Ben Combee (:bcombee)]

Moving to Vivian in preparation for my departure

Comment 18

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Pavlov, this is on your review queue. Will you be able to review it in the next future? It's waiting for 3 months now.

Comment 19

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

We are not sure we want to do anything like this for Fennec 1.1 and for later releases, the method would likely change.

Comment 20

[Tony Chung [:tchung]]

Mark, is there really no way we can get this into 1.1?  i dont know the level of work needed; but i can see offering fennec as an option to default would be highly useful.  

One good use case right now is downloading non-AMO extensions (eg. people.mozilla.org...), will not open in fennec but launch in microB.  the only way around that is to save the extension, and then open it via fennec url and point to local file.  That's pretty annoying and complicated just to run an extension.

Comment 21

[Stuart Parmenter]

this is tough to do in a good way on maemo because of the way the OS launches the browser

Comment 22

[Lars Gunther]

There is an app available called browser-switchboard that lets me set the default browser in the system settings. Have you looked at that?

http://browser-switch.garage.maemo.org/

Comment 23

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

(In reply to comment #22)
> There is an app available called browser-switchboard that lets me set the
> default browser in the system settings. Have you looked at that?
> 
> http://browser-switch.garage.maemo.org/

This is the approach we want to take on Maemo. Fennec won't offer to be the default browser, since there is no concept of a default browser.