Open Akregator links in external web browser with reading view [Both flatpak]

I was wondering if anyone else has encountered the same issue as I have. I know how I would approach this if Akregator was installed on the system rather than as a flatpak, I would just change the command run by the app when opening in an external browser to flatpak run org.mozilla.firefox about:reader?url=%u which just appends the about:reader portion to automatically open it as such. This command does work from my terminal but naturally does not work with Akregator.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

aurtzy,

Thanks for posting about this! I never thought to try this as an Akregator user, but it’s a great idea… I spent the past day getting this to work since I also use the Flatpaks; hope it helps.

As suggested by @progandy, one solution is to define a custom protocol where the URL gets passed to a script that opens Firefox Reader with the URL; here’s what I’ve done:

  1. Decide on a protocol name, which the URL will be prefixed with and passed to xdg-open since that should be available to the Flatpak. I used firefox-reader as the protocol, so I put xdg-open firefox-reader://%u as the custom command (so a command Akregator would run might look like xdg-open firefox-reader://https://example.com).
  2. Define a desktop entry to support the custom protocol (you can see mine below). ~/.local/share/applications is the standard place to put these, as far as I’m aware. Since the custom protocol needs to be removed from the URL, I wrote a script (also below) to do this and then call Firefox with about:reader?url= prefixed. The script can be anywhere in $PATH.
  3. Add the desktop entry as a “default application” for opening URLs using this custom protocol. In my case, I ran xdg-mime default org.mozilla.firefox.reader.desktop x-scheme-handler/firefox-reader (org.mozilla.firefox.reader.desktop is the name of my desktop entry file).
  4. You also might have to update some mime/xdg database stuff. I had to run update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications so xdg-open would find the “Firefox Reader” desktop entry.

My Firefox Reader desktop entry[Desktop Entry] Type=Application Name=Firefox Reader Exec=open-firefox-reader.sh %u StartupNotify=false MimeType=x-scheme-handler/firefox-reader;

open-firefox-reader.sh scriptbash #!/usr/bin/env bash flatpak run --user org.mozilla.firefox about:reader?url=“${1#firefox-reader://}”

If you have any other trouble or want to find more information about this since the desktop entry could probably be tweaked, here are the sources of note I used to figure this out (If I forgot a step or two writing this, they should also be present somewhere in there):

Whooping_Seal, (edited )
@Whooping_Seal@sh.itjust.works avatar

Thank you for the very thorough reply! For god knows what reason I get this error: error: app/org.mozilla.firefox/x86_64/stable not installed when running the xdg-open firefox-reader command, yet manually running flatpak run --user org.mozilla.firefox about:reader?url=https://example.com works just fine. I’ll have to troubleshoot it when I have a bit more time ;p

Thanks again for your very thorough write up and the linked articles. Have a good day :)

Update: It seems like on my system, the –user flag was the issue, removing it made the script function. I am using Fedora Kinoite (Immutable version of KDE Plasma), so perhaps it is just a difference in how flatpak is configured between distros? I’ll have to read into it more later.

aurtzy,

Cheers, glad to hear you got it working. I don’t think there’s any problem on your end; all my flatpaks are user-installed as a Guix System user, so it didn’t cross my mind that a habitually-placed –user flag would not work if something was installed system-wide!

progandy,

Maybe you can register a custom protocol and have your own script outside of flatpak that runs firefox. Then use an xdg-open command that prefixes the custom protocol.

Pantherina,

This is 100% a firefox question, you may want to rephrase it and ask in a firefox forum.

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