Gnome-shell-extension-gsconnect: Browser extension buttons open the default browser

[amivaleo]

Hi!

I have both firefox and chromium installed. If I click on their respective browser extention buttons, I'd expect that the "correct" browser is loaded. Instead, the default browser is loaded.

This, I know, is a really trivial issue. If it requires easy and very short fixing, it would be a nice addition.

[ferdnyc]

I have both firefox and chromium installed. If I click on their respective browser extention buttons, I'd expect that the "correct" browser is loaded. Instead, the default browser is loaded.

That's a difficult thing to do, since each browser can take many different forms. There are three different versions of just the _official_ Google Chrome for Linux (google-chrome aka google-chrome-stable, google-chrome-beta, and google-chrome-unstable), _plus_ chromium and all of the other variations. Firefox similarly has multiple builds and alternative releases.

Even if GSConnect tried to be smart and launch Chrome when I clicked the Chrome extension link, how could it know that I prefer to use google-chrome-unstable for browsing (but still have google-chrome-stable installed as well)? (Edit: And if it _did_ try to be smart, it might launch google-chrome-stable _even though_ my default browser is correctly set to google-chrome-unstable. Meaning that in trying to be clever, it actually made things worse.)

So, whatever link you click is just opened in your default browser.

[ferdnyc]

(In the old days, browser extensions used to be incompatible, so for example an .xpi was identifiable as a Firefox extension. But now they're all WebExtensions, so in _theory_ the same extension is compatible with any browser.

The big browser projects still don't trust each other enough to share a common "store" as the _source_ for their extensions, of course, and they prohibit installation of extensions from any source other than their official "store". So even though the actual code is compatible, extensions still have to be maintained in multiple places to target all of the supported browsers, and compatibility today just comes down to where the extension is hosted.)

[andyholmes]

Yeah, I'm not sure there is much we should do about this. The buttons aren't for installing the add-ons really, just pointing out that they exist.

Even if there were a way to decide what browser to open, it means spawning/forking a browser process from within the Preferences applet. Best to just let the desktop to decide what to do I think.

[amivaleo]

I see, it is indeed a very pedantic request. :D

Thank you for your nice replies as always!

(I didn't get my label this time 🙁️)