Today I was surprised when I found myself no longer able to do something with Firefox that I've taken for grated for a loong time: opening files with an arbitrary external app. As I did not want to open an MP3 file with a GUI app, I right-clicked it to select a custom program to open it, a TUI app, mpg123. As my FF is configured to "always ask" when it has to decide how to open a number of document and media files in "Preferences" -> "Applications", I click and do get the "Opening ....pdf" dialog box. Which, as usual, prompts me to choose from a preset list of applications and shows the "Open with..." -> "Other" menu.
I do go for "Other", find a list of "Recommended Applications" and... nothing more! No way I can select an arbitrary command from the filesystem, that it was installed from a repository package or that it was a script I designed myself. I checked inside the apt logs to see if there was a recent FF update. I found it: [alessandro@wkrstn06 ~]$ grep -B2 -A2 firefox-esr /var/log/apt/history.log Start-Date: 2018-05-10 22:34:53 Commandline: apt-get -y dist-upgrade Upgrade: manpages:amd64 (4.15-1~bpo9+1, 4.16-1~bpo9+1), iceweasel:amd64 (52.7.3esr-1~deb9u1, 52.8.0esr-1~deb9u1), manpages-dev:amd64 (4.15-1~bpo9+1, 4.16-1~bpo9+1), firefox-esr-l10n-it:amd64 (52.7.3esr-1~deb9u1, 52.8.0esr-1~deb9u1), firefox-esr:amd64 (52.7.3esr-1~deb9u1, 52.8.0esr-1~deb9u1) End-Date: 2018-05-10 22:35:00 [alessandro@wkrstn06 ~]$ When they took away ALSA support at least they had a sorry excuse for a technical reason to do so, but what about now? Why on earth did they have to remove the capability of selecting an arbitrary command to run when opening some kind of file with the browser? If this is another product of Mozilla Corp. policies and SW development directions, what do they have inside their skull? Sawdust? I know as a workaroud I could design my own *.desktop file, either systemwide in /usr/share/applications/ of for my specific user in ~/.local/share/applications/, but this still sucks and I still cannot understand what rationale they had to change something that worked so well. Pretty pissed off about this, Alessandro _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
