Desktop wrapper for website

brnix · March 1, 2025, 10:36pm

Do you have to muss around with Window classes to get a proper icon in alt-tab when doing web apps in Firefox?

yeus · March 19, 2025, 6:15pm

I played on your script as well here is the result I went through a lot of iterations.

I replaced the “manual” creation of profiles with the built-in one from nix.
I had a hard time, getting correct icons to work. they now work in the taskbar, but not when using alt-tab
added a downloader script which downloads the favicons in order to have them in the start menu.
multiple apps/per profile. because I haven’t found a way to automatically create persistent profile IDs. hashing the webapp names would be possible. But creates very large IDs making them shorter risks id collisions. not sure if that even works.

here is the link: download_icons.sh · GitHub

yeus · March 19, 2025, 6:17pm

yes… I am struggling with this as well… maybe you’d like to have a look at my script:

gist.github.com

https://gist.github.com/yeus/b1ba57ffe7f71670aa5bde8d6aec4104

download_icons.sh

set -euo pipefail
ICON_DIR="$HOME/.local/share/webapp-icons"
ERR_LOG="$ICON_DIR/error.log"
mkdir -p "$ICON_DIR"
> "$ERR_LOG"

# Use a modern browser User-Agent.
CURL_UA="Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

# Log errors with a timestamp.

This file has been truncated. show original

webapps.nix

{ config, pkgs, pkgs-unstable, pkgs-pinned, pkgs-unsafe, lib, ... }:
let
  webApps = [
    # Personal Profile
    {
      name = "Google Calendar Personal";
      url = "https://calendar.google.com/";
      profile = "personal";
    }
    {

This file has been truncated. show original

it downloads icons for use in the desktop files and the desktop files set the corresponding WM_CLASS so that the icon doesn’t revert back to the firefox default. But I am not sure how all of this works. It was a lot of tinkering. I am not sure if there is a better way to do it… I didn’t find a way to do this with the firefox settings/configuration which would be ideal if firefox could just set its own icon.