Is this a bug in Chromium or is the bug in the .desktop file fta distributes?

Hi evan, I am not sure I understand your question. The desktop file, triggered through the Applications menu shortcut, works fine. If you tell me what data you need I can send it.

Evan is referring to /usr/share/applications/chromium-browser.desktop.

I attach the file.

chromium-browser.desktop 4.5 KB View Download

I see, thanks for the attachment!  Comparing the Ubuntu Chromium .desktop and the Google Chrome one, I see these extra fields in the former:

X-MultipleArgs=false
StartupWMClass=Chromium-browser
StartupNotify=true

I'm not sure what the first one is, but the latter two allow your desktop to properly show the hourglass cursor when launching.  Ideally we'd just launch fast but I guess we should probably add those.

@evan: iirc, this is not about the desktop file but about xdg-utils.
See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+bug/513133

for StartupWMClass, see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+bug/587664
StartupNotify is for the "Window List" gnome applet. Users requested it so that they can see when the app is starting vs is already dead. I don't use that pplet myself though.

In xdg-settings's check_browser_gnome(), $check is /usr/bin/chromium-browser, but $binary is chromium-browser. This is because the Ubuntu Chromium .desktop file has Exec=chromium-browser, whereas Google Chrome has Exec=/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome. I guess the discussion should really continue on the xdg-utils bug: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26300

fta: If you feel any of the extra fields in the .desktop file are worth upstreaming, then please do. I personally don't care for startup notification.

Well, even with the patch in the freedesktop bug, we still fail the fourth check in check_browser_gnome().

using chromium trunk from a recent ubuntu package, if you set chromium as your preferred browser *in gnome*, chromium still shows it's not default.
If now i ask Chromium to become the default browser, it works.
That's too bad to have to select that twice.

I traced it a bit:
It starts from "xdg-settings check default-web-browser chromium-browser.desktop",
finds DE=gnome, calls a bunch of gconf prefs (all pointing to chromium) and gets to a last test pointing to firefox. That's "xdg-mime query default text/html"
xdg-mime gets that from /usr/share/gnome/applications/defaults.list which is a symlink to /etc/gnome/defaults.list itself provided by the desktop-file-utils package.
I don't understand why xdg-settings has to go that deep..

This one is different. It's because the chromium packages don't specify the full path in the desktop files.

(Un-ccing myself from bugs.)