777121 - When an app fails to launch via the browser, send an error up to JS to indicate to web content that the app failed to launch and why

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core Graveyard :: DOM: Apps, defect)

Description

[Jason Smith [:jsmith]]

When an app fails to launch via the browser, we currently do not report any error back either through returning an error code or throwing an exception to indicate to web content that the app failed to launch and why. We should provide a way to indicate to web content that when an app fails to launch, indicate why it failed in JS so that web content can handle it accordingly.

Comment 1

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

I agree that we should fix this.  And the fix does have a desktop-specific component.  But it also requires us to fix an underlying issue in the mozApps API, which unconditionally calls the success callback for a "launch" request after sending a webapps-launch notification:

https://github.com/mozilla/mozilla-central/blob/2c83384d5ad30903d97014c5320ab2e0e5666f18/dom/apps/src/Webapps.jsm#L1020-L1021

We might want to track the API and runtime-specific parts of the fix in separate bugs, but let's use this bug to track both for the moment, since we might end up fixing them together.

Thus moving this to the appropriate product/component for the underlying issue with the API.

Comment 2

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

This would be easily fixable for the desktop runtime as we don't need to call notifyObserver but could directly call WebappOSUtils.launch. But I guess we want to keep the same behavior between platforms, so we could create an observer in Webapps.jsm that waits for a "webapps-launched" event.

Comment 3

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

(In reply to Marco Castelluccio [:marco] from comment #2)
> This would be easily fixable for the desktop runtime as we don't need to
> call notifyObserver but could directly call WebappOSUtils.launch. But I
> guess we want to keep the same behavior between platforms, so we could
> create an observer in Webapps.jsm that waits for a "webapps-launched" event.

We also need to associate that event with the launch request that triggered it.

Comment 4

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Core Graveyard / DOM: Apps is inactive. Closing all bugs in this component.