Intro & thanks¶

About a year ago I wrote about my gripes with Firefox not playing nicely with KDE Plasma Activities and how I created an Activity-aware Firefox hack/wrapper. While I was pretty happy with it back then and especially the 0.2 version, since then things have improved quite a bit.

First of all, it seems others found my solution useful as well and even started filing issues and contributing code. I am ever so grateful for that, as I was already at the limits of my shell scripting skills with the 0.2 version and Activity-aware Firefox would have never gotten as good as it is now, without the help of Cristian Le and Jarosław Czarniak!

Version 0.4.1 is now the first version I would consider ready for mass use and if you are also a heavy user of both Plasma’s Activities and Firefox, I would warmly recommend you try it out.

Main changes¶

So what are the biggest notable changes since my last blog post about it that grew my 30-line “works for me” proof of concept into a much more mature 285-line script?

• in general it is rewritten to be distro-agnostic and much safer and reliable to use
• it includes interactive elements
  • dialog (including help) on first launch that assists with starting a new Profile, copying some info from either the default or template Profile, or migrating from the earliest versions (0.1 and 0.2)
  • dialog to clean up Profiles that are left over from deleted Activities
  • desktop notifications
• dependency check
• debug mode (activityfirefox +x)
• names of Firefox Profiles now include the names of the respecfive Plasma Activities

In addition to that, we have equipped the repository to resemble a serious project.

It now includes both a very informativeREADME and a well-structuredCHANGELOG. We are using tags and releases to mark important points in the development. And last, but not least, the repository is REUSE-compliant, so licensing and copyright information is as good as it gets.

Invitation to use & contribute¶

That said, you are warmly invited to visit Activity-aware Firefox’ GitLab repository, where you can read more about it, install and use it …and of course, help make it even better by contributing code, bug reports or ideas :)

hook out → mmmm, chestnuts