716689 - standalone apps try to handle some HTTP links

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox Graveyard :: Web Apps, defect)

Description

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

When I run a webapp by clicking its native icon on the Mac, it apparently registers itself with the OS as a handler for http: clicks, as some http clicks from other apps bring my webapp to the front rather than an actual browser.

Comment 1

[Anant Narayanan [:anant]]

This probably has something to do with the fact that we re-use the firefox-bin from the originating browser (which would have registered for http: clicks). The stand-alone app isn't really stand-alone in that it's not a different binary running the process that controls the app window.

Comment 2

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

It's enough to make this style of app effectively unusable, because it means that some set of URL clicks from other apps either need to be copy-pasted into the real Firefox, or, if that's not possible, they simply can't be viewed.

This should be fixable, I think, with some preference tweaking in the profiles for those apps.  http://mxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/mozilla/browser/app/profile/firefox.js#555 should help you get started.  The code in Gecko that handles this stuff is extra ugly, feel free to ping me for help digging through it, as I served some time there.  :-)

Comment 3

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

To be clear, I'd start by working with the "expose" preferences slightly below the link I pasted.  That said, this stuff is all inter-related...

Comment 4

[Jason Smith [:jsmith]]

It's possible this may still be a issue. On Safari, I noticed that each web application was registered as a "browser" that you could default to. This sounds like incorrect behavior. Would this issue be linked to the bug specified here?

Comment 5

[Jason Smith [:jsmith]]

Open a new bug for comment 4. Confirm it does not happen?

Comment 6

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

Does this still happen? I have a number of native apps installed and none of them show up in Safari and launching some of them then clicking a link from TextEdit still results in my default browser.

Comment 7

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

I see three native apps in Safari's "Default web browser" dropdown menu.  But they're all apps I installed a while ago, back when the runtime was under heavy development, and before we ripped out a bunch of Firefox from the runtime.  And I'm unable to reproduce with new app installations on the latest nightly build.

So I suspect that this was a problem with the original implementation, against which dmose filed this bug, and with early versions of the new implementation, but it isn't a problem anymore.