tl;dr
   Should firefox-esr (and/or plasma-desktop, desktop-base)
   depend/recommend the package desktop-file-utils ?



Dear Maintainer,

I tried to setup a Zoom conference desktop client within
a Debian Bullseye install.

To test this I tried to start a test video call via
Firefox heading to https://zoom.us/test.

Unfortunately I just got the following message in the website:

     Click *Open link* on the dialog shown by your browser
     If you don't see a dialog, click Launch Meeting below

Unfortunately this button did not show any reaction if clicked.

Trying to manually enter a "zoommtg://test" link leads to the firefox message:
     The address wasn’t understood
     Firefox doesn’t know how to open this address, because one of the following
     protocols (zoommtg) isn’t associated with any program or is not allowed in this context.


So I started investigating by comparing to an minimal Ubuntu 20.04
with just installing kubuntu-desktop, which worked out of the box.

I tried then in a minimal Debian bookworm also Firefox from unstable
and the Mozilla upstream build, both also not working.


Finally my comparison got me further:

- The file /usr/share/applications/Zoom.desktop contains:
     /usr/share/applications/Zoom.desktop:MimeType=x-scheme-handler/zoommtg;...

- update-desktop-database from package desktop-file-utils creates a
   cache file /usr/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache.

- Firefox reads additional protocol handlers from this file /usr/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache.



So I want to raise the question if firefox-esr (and/or plasma-desktop, desktop-base)
should depend/recommend the package desktop-file-utils ?
Maybe also in Bullseye?



(Sorry for the lengthy mail, but I wanted to place the messages and keywords
here, to aid future users with their internet searches,
because this took me quite long to figure out.)

Kind regards,
Bernhard

Hi Bernard,

Thanks for raising this issue - it certainly helped me! This after quite
a number of hours trying to understand why zoom would not launch
properly.

I agree with your suggestion that this should be a recommended
dependency for firefox-esr.

Although it would also make sense as a dependency for some of the KDE
packages - I noticed that desktop-file-utils is listed as a dependency
for gnome, mate, and cinnamon, but not for anything from KDE.

Thanks again,

Marten

Hi Bernard,


Thanks for the finding this. It helped me out too.


Found a similar problem in that Firefox-Esr wouldn't open appstream urls
in KDE/Discover. Tried the same thing with Chromium and it opened as
expected.

After finding this bug report, I installed desktop-file-utils and
Firefox-Esr opened the appstream url as expected in KDE/Discover.

Tested using appstream://org.kde.dolphin.desktop


Thanks

Sheik

Tested the following scenario to confirm that firefox-esr needs
desktop-file-utils installed as a dependency to handle various protocols.


Test Cases

 1. Run firefox-esr and open appstream://org.kde.dolphin.desktop -
    should launch KDE Discover.
 2. Run xdg-open appstream://org.kde.dolphin.desktop - should launch KDE
    Discover.


Test Results

 1. fire-fox-esr failed to launch KDE Discover - fail
 2. xdg-open launched KDE Discover - pass


Test Results with workaround

 1. Installed desktop-file-utils
 2. fire-fox-esr launched KDE Discover - pass
 3. xdg-open launched KDE Discover - pass


Thanks
Sheik