Ubuntu – When will Firefox 5 be in the official repositories

Ubuntu 11.04 will release with Firefox 4.0. However, other supported Ubuntu releases will remain with Firefox 3.6 in the medium term. When Firefox 3.6 approaches end-of-life, the other supported Ubuntu releases will be upgraded to the latest version of Firefox, although this may not be 4.0.

For those Ubuntu releases, we will provide semi-official packages of Firefox 4.0 in a PPA.

• How do I install the latest stable version of Firefox?

Easy solution

Close all Firefox windows (also this one!). Run firefox -ProfileManager and add a new profile for your web application. You can then remove the tab bar in the preferences and all other disturbing GUI elements. Close everything and run the profile manager again to select your default profile this time. Now Firefox should start your default profile if you untick "ask everytime".

Then create a file my_webapplication.desktop and create a launcher. This is an example for the Google calendar:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Google Calendar
Exec=firefox -P gcalendar -no-remote
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=firefox

The icon should be better not firefox, but a path to a icon of your choice.
gcalendar is the profile name I chose before.

Improvement

If your application is already open, opening this launcher again will result in an error. You can install wmctrl and use this small script to run your web application:

# Is there any window with Google Calendar in the title?
if [ -z "`wmctrl -l|grep 'Google Calendar'`" ]; then
  # No --> run it
  firefox -P gcalendar -no-remote;
else
  # Yes --> change focus to this window
  wmctrl -a 'Google Calendar';
fi

Use Chromium

Well... I ḱind of gave up. Chromium is the easiest solution. Just click "Create application shortcut..." (in "Tools") and you're done. You'll find a *.desktop file in ~/.local/share/applications which can be customized.

You might want to customize the *.desktop file. E.g. docky does not recognize a Chromium web application as a different application, so the Chromium icon is displayed instead. You can change this behaviour using the WMClass as described here. But you will have to add also a parameter --class=MyArbitraryChromiumAppname as discussed in this bug report. If you want to run Google Calendar your *.desktop file in .local/share/applications/ should look like this:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=Google Calendar
Exec=/usr/bin/chromium-browser "--app=https://www.google.com/calendar/render?gsessionid=HERE_GOES_THE_SESSION_ID_CREATED_AUTOMATICALLY" --class=gcal
Terminal=false
X-MultipleArgs=false
Type=Application
Icon=/home/peter/.icons/google_calendar.png
Categories=Network;WebBrowser;
StartupNotify=true
StartupWMClass=gcal

Note: you have to add --class=gcal and set the property StartupWMClass=gcal (you can choose any name instead of gcal).