Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Alexander Skwar <listen@×××××××××××××××.name>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-dev] What's the use of mozilla-launcher?
Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2006 09:08:56
Message-Id: 2809393.vGBBEaTdCQ@work.message-center.info
1 Hello!
2
3 A while back, I discovered that mozilla-launcher is causing problems,
4 when the URL contains a "," (comma); eg. http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/0,1518,447923,00.html
5
6 In Knode/KDE, I configured, that firefox is to be used as the browser,
7 so that when I click on a URL, it's loaded in firefox. I did this by
8 modifying .kde/share/config/kdeglobals and adding/changing:
9
10 [General]
11 BrowserApplication=!/usr/bin/firefox
12
13 That can also somehow be done with kcontrol.
14
15 This works well - when I click on a URL, /usr/bin/firefox is run
16 with one parameter, which is the URL. But if the URL contains
17 a comma (like the example URL further up), that site isn't correctly
18 loaded. Instead of http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/0,1518,447923,00.html
19 it would load http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/0,1518,447923. Reason is, that
20 firefox executes mozilla-launcher which will eventually run
21 "mozilla-xremote-client openURL($u)". The problem with that is,
22 that openURL accepts two parameters and they are seperated with
23 a ,. So it sees two parameters: http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/0,1518,447923 and
24 00.html - 00.html is not a valid parameter, though. It should be
25 something like new-window.
26
27 When I use the "original" Firefox from mozilla.com, there's no such
28 problem. That is so, because the original firefox script doesn't
29 use openURL anymore.
30
31 I now changed the /usr/bin/firefox script so, that it doesn't
32 use mozilla-launcher anymore. Up to now, I can't find any problems.
33
34 What problems did I overlook? And what's actually the use of
35 mozilla-launcher with current firefoxes?
36
37 What would break, if mozilla-launcher is no longer used?
38
39 Cf. https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=150404
40
41 There's now a patch added to this bug, but I actually object
42 this patch. This patch replaces , in the parameters with
43 %2c (%2c = ,). At a first glance, this patch seemed somewhat
44 fine.
45
46 Having had a closer "look" at this, I dislike this patch. Reason:
47 Up to now firefox eventually runs the openURL remote command. Users
48 might know this and might make use of this. So a user might call
49 "firefox http://gentoo.org/,new-tab" to have http://gentoo.org/
50 opened in a new tab. If this patch is applied, this won't work
51 anymore.
52
53 I'd like to suggest, that mozilla-launcher is no longer a dependency
54 of firefox and is no longer used, as I fail to see, what advantages
55 m-l brings.
56
57 Thanks,
58
59 Alexander Skwar
60 --
61 Well, hey, let's just make everything into a closure, and then we'll
62 have our general garbage collector, installed by "use less memory".
63 -- Larry Wall in <199710221744.KAA24484@××××.org>
64
65
66 --
67 gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-dev] What's the use of mozilla-launcher? Matthew Kennedy <mkennedy@g.o>
Re: [gentoo-dev] What's the use of mozilla-launcher? Thomas de Grenier de Latour <degrenier@×××××××××××.fr>