FFE: Firefox and Thunderbird (XUL) menus don't appear in the global menu bar

Firefox in an XUL application not GTK. Right now focus is on GTK and some QT apps. XUL will be taken care of in the next cycle I assume.

Ok...

I agree.

Confirmed, ie it doesn't work, and was not a target for Maverick.

Besides, the application should not on appmenu's blacklist, so it should use it's own menus and the default panel menu (stubs, ie File/Edit) should not be present anymore.

This bug is not invalid: Firefox's and Thunderbird's menus should appear in the menu bar, just like they do in Mac OS X for example.

Marking as invalid for the indicator-appmenu tasks and adding a xulrunner one. I dont' beleive there is any changes required to indicator-appmenu for this to work, only to xulrunner.

I took a look at the firefox-gnome-globalmenu extension. It has a few problems though:

- It has a lot of caveats about non-functioning menus in the TODO file
- It doesn't hide the Firefox rendered menu bar (so you have 2 bars)
- It's quite a hacky implementation (walking the dom tree to build a load of xml. I'm not sure how well this would scale to large menus).

I think the only way to do this properly is to source patch Firefox to basically do what already happens on the Mac, by providing our own nsINativeMenuService implementation

Another extension does exist to hide the menubar in Firefox, but your approach seems the best, both for Firefox and for Ubuntu in the long run.

OpenOffice doesn't appear in the global menu bar either for some reason.

That's a different bug. They use different toolkits, this bug is Gecko specific

OpenOffice doesn't appear in the global menu bar either for some reason.

Sorry; apparently I posted duplicate comments because Firefox froze when the first comment was posted.

Updated the description to include a link to Mr. Coulson's globalmenu-extension project, since that information is relevant to anyone who is interested in this bug.

@ks64: openoffice is tracked in a separate bug, and it's currently not supported by the appmenu system, being neither GTK, nor Gnome, nor XUL.

The openoffice bug is https://bugs.launchpad.net/indicator-appmenu/+bug/664731 for reference.

Is a firefox (high-level) extension really the right way to go about this?

Would it not be better to patch XULRunner (Gecko) to be compliant with indicator-appmenu (the back-end for Unity's menu and indicator-applet-appmenu). This would then apply to ANY XUL/Gecko based application with a Menu Bar and would work on any system with libindicate and indicator-appmenu.

It would need to: a) Send menus over DBus. and b) If menu is being drawn elsewhere - do not draw menu within window.

Basically it would mean porting Chris Coulson's code to XULRunner, instead of an XUL extension...

Hmmm, well, my extension already does both a) and b) (and those requirements are fairly obvious, you didn't really need to specify them ;) )

In addition to that, it's design is basically the same as it would be if it was part of Mozilla core, so technically it doesn't matter if it's an extension or not as it would end up being pretty much the same code. It has been designed that way from the start with the intention that it would be merged in to Mozilla core at some point in the future.

I'm not sure what you mean when you refer to it as a "high-level" extension. If you're referring to where it sits in the stack, you might want to check out the code....

Note, the extension basically implements a slightly modified version of the nsINativeMenuService interface (see http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/fb8e4cdf2346/widget/public/nsINativeMenuService.h), which is what is used on the Mac version already.

Sounds good..
And regarding the "high-level" thing, I was referring to it as high-level software, not a high-level add-on/extension or high-level code execution.

How difficult would it be to port this to become a XULRunner (it is XULRunner that renders XUL windows - right?) patch?
I mean, if Mozilla don't accept it then we could always add it to our infamous list of Ubuntu-specific patches ;)

If Mozilla don't accept it, then we can't add it as a patch anyway. Even if they do accept it, it could take a while (not in Natty timeframe), and I'm not prepared to maintain such a substantial patch for 18 months. Having to maintain the same patch in Firefox, Thunderbird and xulrunner, and having to refresh it to apply again every few weeks when there is a security update is a maintenance burden and would create even more work for me.

I'm not sure why you're so obsessed with converting this in to a patch for me to maintain instead, it makes absolutely no difference for users but makes my life difficult instead.

Like I've said already in this bug report, and another one where you bought up the same issue as well - the plan is for this to become part of Mozilla core. As I've said already, I'm already working on that so please stop asking the same questions and making the same point over and over again.

I appologize for repeating my self - I honestly didn't remember asking the question before.
Your doing a great job with your code, and the long term target seems amazing (XUL supporting global menu without extensions).
So I apologize for harassing you, and request you keep up the amazing work :)

It seems to me that this is further along that "triaged" (I'm using the menus now) is that the appropriate status?

I've landed this for Thunderbird now, it should be available in a few hours

Original FFE was in bug 727068, duplicated.

This has been tested by several desktop team members for several weeks now, and was just blocked by an OK of Mozilla. Approved for upload after alpha-3.

This bug was fixed in the package firefox - 4.0~b12+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu3

---------------
firefox (4.0~b12+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu3) natty; urgency=low

  * Land the Unity appmenu extension work. It's shipped in its own package,
    although we build it from the Firefox source tree (LP: #637827)
  * Fix build with system NSPR
    - update debian/firefox-dev.install.in
  * Don't trample on existing alternatives in the postinst script if
    we detect Ubuntuzilla breakage
    - update debian/firefox.postinst.in
 -- Chris Coulson <email address hidden> Thu, 03 Mar 2011 16:18:56 +0000

Unable to import Firefox bookmarks because Show All Bookmarks does not reveal menu"Organize, Views, Import/Backup".
Plain Natty fresh install -- NO Compiz. Stuck with Classic until this is fixed.

I have 5.0+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.11.04.2 and the menu does not show.
It was there before.