URL handling in Gnome broken, recently

[Joe Marcus Clarke]

On 8/3/11 7:34 AM, Michal Varga wrote:
> Does anyone know which update broke url handling in Gnome some time
> recently, I'd assume in between last one-to-three weeks?
> 
> I realized the symptoms too late to narrow it down to a specific port
> now, and I have no idea what handles url requests - gnome-vfs, maybe, or
> some friends above/below?
> 
> Basically, opening an URL now from any gnome/gtk application is
> completely fubared, clicking a web page link in something like
> gnome-terminal, pidgin, etc. launches a new epiphany window instead of
> reusing the old one and opening a new tab (thus completely ignoring
> 'preferences > preferred applications' control panel), clicking a link
> from evolution even silently fails half the time, or some times launches
> a new browser instance about ten minutes later, clicking any http image
> link first internally checks the mime type (or it seems so) on the
> server and then launches the url in eog (merciful god, why), and so on.
> 
> It's really impossible to work with URLs in Gnome at this moment, other
> than manually copy/pasting them into a running browser every single
> time.
> 
> Some ideas on what went wrong?

GLib was changed to no longer use gconf to determine the default URL
handlers.  To get the original new-tab behavior back, you will need to
create a new .desktop file for your browser.

Go to ~/.local/share/applications and copy
/usr/local/share/applications/epiphany.desktop to
./epiphany-newtab.desktop.  Edit the file and add:

NoDisplay=true

Change the Exec line to:

epiphany --new-tab %U

And change the MimeType line to:

MimeType=text/html;text/xml;application/xhtml+xml;x-scheme-handler/http;x-scheme-handler/https;

Then run:

update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications

Then you should be set.

Joe

> 
> m.
> 
> 


-- 
Joe Marcus Clarke
FreeBSD GNOME Team	::	gnome at FreeBSD.org
FreeNode / #freebsd-gnome
http://www.FreeBSD.org/gnome