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.

#3

I know this is an ancient thread, but just in case anybody else still has this problem - I just found a solution that worked for me.

I’ve installed the latest Thunderbird ESR release with these instructions:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/installing-thunderbird-linux#w_system-thunderbird-installation-for-advanced-users

I’ve added the following property to the thunderbird.desktop file:

StartupWMClass=Mail

I’ve realized that the Thunderbird master password prompt has WM_CLASS=Thunderbird

while the Thunderbird main window has
WM_CLASS=Mail

I’m not very educated on the internal workings of the GNOME dock and such, but my theory is that the icons in the dock can only be properly assigned to the corresponding open windows with the WM_CLASS. It might also just have something to do with parent and child windows and with the fact that the main Thunderbird window is invisible until the password prompt is properly submitted.

Anyway, hope this might be helpful to somebody in the future.