Installing Thunderbird (Beta) in GNOME dock

Thunderbird
#1

Hi

I have recently moved from the version of Thunderbird that came with Ubuntu 18.04 to a download of Beta from https://www.thunderbird.net/en-GB/, mainly because “Beta is better”(!). I have installed it and have moved my profile across and all looks okay, but I am having one small niggling problem.

I have the GNOME desktop environment, with the GNOME dock. In the same way that I added a Mozilla build of Firefox Nightly, I have added a .desktop file to add Thunderbird to the dock. The contents of the file (based on what I know works fine for Firefox Nightly) are:

Type=Application
Name=Thunderbird Mail
Comment=Send and receive mail with Thunderbird
Exec=/home/user/thunderbird/thunderbird-bin %u
Terminal=false
Icon=/opt/thunderbird/chrome/icons/default/default128.png
MimeType=x-scheme-handler/mailto;application/x-xpinstall;
X-Desktop-File-Install-Version=0.23

The (new) icon does appear, and looks great, but whenever I run Thunderbird, it appears as a second icon at the bottom of the dock, not run from the one I have selected, despite the %u flag to the Exec.

Has anyone any ideas on how I can fix this?

#2

You installed Beta to the home directory and still have the release installed?

It looks like you are using the release icon in your .desktop file.

I have 2 icon entries in my .desktop file on 16.04 Unity.

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Icon[en_US]=/home/user/Apps/thunderbird/tbbeta/chrome/icons/default/default32.png
Name[en_US]=TbBeta
Exec=/home/user/Apps/thunderbird/tbbeta/thunderbird -p
Name=TbBeta
Icon=/home/user/Apps/thunderbird/tbbeta/chrome/icons/default/default32.png

At first creation of the .desktop file, the first icons path was different from the second icons path, and didn’t display properly when Thunderbird was running. Making them the same fixed it for me.