Bug#612837: iceweasel: doesn't show evince in "save" dialog

[P. J. McDermott]

On 02/10/2011 08:22 PM, Krasu wrote:
> Package: iceweasel
> Version: 3.5.16-4
> Severity: normal
> 
> If I try to open a PDF file from a web page, iceweasel will show "save" dialog.
> It won't contain evince (it will contain only GIMP). Evince-gtk is installed.
> 
> # LC_ALL=C apt-cache policy evince-gtk
> evince-gtk:
>   Installed: 2.30.3-2
>   Candidate: 2.30.3-2
>   Version table:
>  *** 2.30.3-2 0
>         500 http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ squeeze/main i386 Packages
>          20 http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ sid/main i386 Packages
>         100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

I see you're using Iceweasel under KDE (as am I). Unfortunately,
integration of the stock Mozilla Firefox and Iceweasel web browsers into
KDE is less than optimal. Even if you set Evince as your default PDF
viewer in KDE, Iceweasel won't offer it as an option when opening PDF
files. You'll have to select "Other...", navigate through the file
picker to /usr/bin, and find the Evince binary there. It's not very
pretty from a usability standpoint, but at least Iceweasel will remember
your selection so you can simply choose Evince after the initial search.

There is however work to improve this situation so that Firefox can
query and use KDE's default applications, use KDE's file picker, etc.
This is being done through an application called "kmozillahelper",
developed by an openSUSE developer. I had worked on packaging this for
Debian[1], but unfortunately the helper program is functionally useless
unless the web browser codebase is patched to communicate with it. Mike
Hommey and I discussed it[1], and he noted that such functionality would
be much better implemented as an Iceweasel extension (which could then
work for Icedove, Iceape, and upstream Mozilla applications). He said
he'd look into what hooks could be used to do this and that I should
check back with him around now actually.

I had been holding off on that through the Squeeze release, but since
you brought this up, now's as good a time as any I suppose. So I'm CCing
pkg-mozilla-maintainers and the kmozillahelper ITP bug (#608171). Mike,
have you had time to check into how kmozillahelper's shell service could
be implemented in an extension?

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=608171

Thanks,
P. J.