Bugzilla – Bug 299591
Firefox can't launch irc:// links
Last modified: 2009-09-18 22:50:07 UTC
If you click on an IRC link, i.e. irc://irc.freenode.net/suse in KDE Firefox, it does not launch any IRC client. The file associations for the irc protocol are appropriately set in KDE's file associations (and hence this works in Konqueror), but it doesn't look like it's set up for Firefox, so if you do you just get an error.
That's one of the several file/protocol association "bugs" which simply happen because Firefox doesn't recognize KDE settings. Firefox as a GTK application uses gconf and gnome-vfs to get the information what to launch. On my 10.2 system it tries to open purple-url-handler which seems to be "correct". So either modify the gconf setting for the irc protocol or create the pref network.protocol-handler.external.irc and specify a graphical IRC application via about:config or manually in your FF profile.
For me this is a bug and not an enhancement: on the Beta3plus-Live-GNOME-CD.iso clicking on "Connect me to #openSUSE!" in the Online Help pages opens a dialog asking whether to open it with "purple-url-handler "%s" and then "Launch application" does nothing.
Reassigning to libpurple maintainers.
The summary references Firefox in KDE but the same happens in GNOME. It should really be a blocker and not wait for upstream. See comment#2.
Agreed, "should_go_upstream" makes no sense if there isn't any reference to the upstream bug.
There was a should_go_upstream flag w/o any information in this bug? What's the underlying issue? Has anyone even tried? I just did and found that pidgin refuses to do anything if no IRC account is configured or if pidgin is not running at all. So the basic analysis of that bug is that pidgin (aka purple-url-handler) is not suited as a generic url handler at the moment IMHO.
In KDE it does absolutely nothing, however, which is very annoying (we want all users to be able to click on irc:// links when we tell them about IRC support).
Changing to component GNOME. Sorry for the spam.
Wasn't there a discussion about default IRC client in GNOME and we decided it ought to be XChat - would that resolve this? xchat --url=irc://irc.freenode.net/whatever would work...
This can easily be closed - pidgin needs patching so that purple.schemas doesn't set /schemas/desktop/gnome/url-handlers/irc/command and gnome-vfs2 needs patching so that desktop_gnome_url_handlers.schemas sets the same key to xchat --existing --url="%s"
Created attachment 218645 [details] Patch for pidgin to disable using the purple url handler for irc://
Created attachment 218646 [details] Amended patch for pidgin to disable using the purple url handler for irc:// First patch had error.
Created attachment 218649 [details] Patch for gnome-vfs2 to enable xchat as irc:// handler. Replaces current patch of same name in gnome-vfs2.
This works in Factory