Technitribe

Recently I noticed that in my IRC client, when I right-click a URL and select “Open Link In Browser”, the system would open a new browser window (or tab if appropriate) but not pointed to the link I wanted to visit. It would just open the home page.

What gives? Well, I happen to know from experience that in Linux most programs that need to use a “default” type service of which there are many implementations (such as a web-browser) use the xdg-open command. XDG associates different mime-types to default applications. Step one then is to figure out what’s going on with XDG.

% xdg-mime query default text/html
firefox.desktop firefox.desktop

Here I’m asking XDG what applications are associated with the text/html mime-type. Seeing two firefox.desktop files was a bit of a surprise. Let’s find out more!

% locate firefox.desktop
/usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop
/usr/share/xfce4/helpers/firefox.desktop

So I open up those two files and the first file looks normal and that file actually belongs to the Firefox package according to rpm -qf. In the second file, I see

X-XFCE-Commands=%B -remote "openURL(about:blank,new-window)";%B;
X-XFCE-CommandsWithParameter=%B -remote "openURL(%s,new-window)";%B "%s";

That looks strange to me. If I want to open a URL from the command line, I don’t use openURL. Let’s see what happens if I replace that with

X-XFCE-Commands=%B;
X-XFCE-CommandsWithParameter=%B "%s";

Aha! It works! But why? Well, after a little searching I came across Mozilla Bug 1080319. Looks like the openURL was a legacy thing and got removed in Firefox 36. And a quick rpm -q firefox confirms that I’m running that version. Firefox 36.0.1 add support for openURL back in, but my hack will serve until that version hits Fedora.