Coming from Windows, I was finding it a bit of a task for something as simple as setting up a desktop shortcut, however I found the Alacarte tool after some digging on forums and found it to be much better than writing 10 lines or so in a text file everytime I wanted to create a shortcut to a downloaded file that wasn’t in the Purism repo.
You can get Alacarte from the Purism repo by typing the following into the terminal:
sudo apt-get install alacarte
On the left are some app categories, and as I had just downloaded a tarball of Firefox Quantum, I extracted it. Then in Alacarte I went to the logical category of internet, setup a new item that pointed to the file, *make sure you insert quotation marks around the file path " ", found an icon and named it and voila, it appears in your application area and search entries and you can add it as a favourite.
I have that too, the ‘taskbar’ thinks it’s Purebrowser, but I can launch both PB and FF simultaneously and separately, slightly weird behaviour. But hey, it works.
Yes Quantum (57) extracted from the tar.gz download, I’m running Dash 2 Panel as you suggested in your tutorial post. Since I grabbed it from the software app, I thought that just running $ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade will update it automatically.
If anyone figures how to run FF as its own icon, please share.
actually sudo apt update/upgrade will not update the GNOME Shells. You have to download the shells directly from the GNOME Shell Ext site. The easiest is to install the FF app for this from here, and then navigate to this page to view your current extensions, update any which can be updated.
Ah, gotcha. Installed the extension (useful, found a config for dash2panel I didn’t know existed), but there’s no prompts to update which makes me think I’m on most current version. I looked through every option, but couldn’t find one that let me split Purebrowser ‘running’ icon from Firefox’s.
indeed, you will get a green update icon showing when an extension has an update.
Indeed, I don’t think there is such an option. Initially I too had the 2 apps summarised under the same icon. Updating my extensions fixed it. It is also possible that my combinations of extensions forces the 2 icons to be separate, I have installed an extension called Alternate Tab which I am thinking could be affecting the behaviour… here is a list of my installed extensions, maybe this might help:
Ah, the green boxes, thanks. However I still have the same problem.
I have ticked all the green boxes (some had a red error next to them which disappeared after reboot). Checked settings in Alternate Tab, nothing there. Checked my extensions against yours - disabled the same ones…
Did you merely extract the FF tarball and add shortcut with this method or did you install in another way @vrata? I also added to favourites
strange. I extracted and installed my ff tar ball in the /opt folder (the accepted location for software installation done outside the package manager).
When I launched my FF the first time (it was v53) it created a launcher automatically, but the icon on the dash2 would merge with PureBroswer. However, with subsequent updates/reboots it eventually had its own icon. I also placed it as a favourite on my dash2 bar which I originally thought to be the reason for its decoupling with the PB icon… but apparently not working for you.
Sorry, but I don’t have much else to suggest. Here is the content of my .desktop launcher files,
$ cat /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Firefox
Name[bg]=Purebrowser
...
Comment=Browse the World Wide Web
...
GenericName=Web Browser
...
X-GNOME-FullName=Firefox Web Browser
...
Exec=firefox %u
Terminal=false
X-MultipleArgs=false
Type=Application
Icon=/opt/firefox/browser/icons/mozicon128.png
Categories=Network;WebBrowser;
MimeType=text/html;text/xml;application/xhtml+xml;application/xml;application/vnd.mozilla.xul+xml;application/rss+xml;application/rdf+xml;image/gif;image/jpeg;image/png;x-scheme-handler/http;x-scheme-handler/https;
StartupWMClass=Firefox
StartupNotify=true
$ cat /usr/share/applications/purebrowser.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Purebrowser
Name[bg]=Purebrowser
...
Comment=Browse the World Wide Web
...
GenericName=Web Browser
...
X-GNOME-FullName=Purebrowser Web Browser
...
Exec=purebrowser %u
Terminal=false
X-MultipleArgs=false
Type=Application
Icon=purebrowser
Categories=Network;WebBrowser;
MimeType=text/html;text/xml;application/xhtml+xml;application/xml;application/vnd.mozilla.xul+xml;application/rss+xml;application/rdf+xml;image/gif;image/jpeg;image/png;x-scheme-handler/http;x-scheme-handler/https;
StartupWMClass=Firefox
StartupNotify=true
Hrmm, tried putting it into the /opt directory (via terminal sudo mv - annoying!) but still shows as PB. Eh, it’s not the biggest thing in the world ¯\_(ツ) _/¯
