Comment 64 for bug 18995

@Coren: Thanks Coren, it makes things clearer. Your patch is then needed (solving a first problem, without solving the 'Open with' one, but it's better than nothing).

@ktulu77: In the Gmome mailing list (MarkMail) I referenced, there are two points of view :
- extraction from Nautilus and integration in GTK,
- keep in Nautilus with a DBus functionality to access it from other apps.

I'll try to summarize some points of the MarkMail conversation. It seems that some applications have already developed their own native 'Open with' clone dialog or something approaching (EOG, gThumb with context menu listing). Evince, Epiphany seems also waiting for such a solution. Thunar has already made something available to external apps through DBus.

This conversation seems to have ended on May 2008 and not being alive since. Would be interesting contacting authors to know if they have made some developments on this.

The point is that we have 3 places talking of the same problem : this Launchpad bug report specifically targeting Firefox (and Thunderbird), the Firefox Bugzilla bug report and the Gnome mailing list. The problem is clearly beyond Firefox, even though it is affected and must be corrected. Every application could expect to have an easy access to an 'Open with' applications listing through a GUI (GTK component) or a returned applications list.

In my opinion, it's something common to all desktop environments and though could be a FreeDesktop specification.

The correction of this bug in the one hundred paper cuts seems unreachable if it involves modification of the GTK lib or/and the creation and the implementation of a FreeDesktop spec, but we could at least found an agreement on the way to reach such a solution.