dfox="~/Preview/firefox-developer/firefox --profile ~/.mozilla/firefox/7ahl24yk.default/'

I was able to launch Firefox Developer quickly enough. Unfortunately, I found it annoying that I couldn’t just type [Super Key] + “Fire” in GNOME and be on my way to browsing the web.

Adding a launcher icon for Firefox Developer

I wanted to add a desktop entry/launcher icon for Firefox Developer. I searched and found the Alacarte package, which is the GUI-way of doing this. Alas, adding entries in Alacarte led to the following problem:

Problem 1: Alacarte didn’t allow me to actually click “OK”. Both with the version from the Fedora repositories, alacarte-3.11.91-4.fc24 via sudo dnf install alacarte, as well as a version built from source, 1bb265f7 via git clone git://git.gnome.org/alacarte, did I have these issues.

Solution: Create the .desktop file by hand. (Also, probably submit a bug report.)

In ~/.local/share/applications/firefox.desktop, I added the following lines:

[Desktop Entry]
Comment=Browse the World Wide Web
Terminal=false
Name=Firefox Developer Browser
Exec=~/Preview/firefox-developer/firefox --profile ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default %U
Type=Application
Icon=~/Preview/firefox-developer/browser/icons/mozicon128.png
Categories=Network;

where xxxxxxxx.default is my default profile directory. My starting point was browsing a few .desktop files in ~/.local/share/applications/ (user installed applications) and /usr/share/applications/ (system-wide applications), for reference.

I ran into an issue, however:

Problem 2: If I added Firefox to my Favorites (the dock on the left where openened and manually added applications sit), I would get a duplicated menu entry.

Solution: Add StartupWMClass=Firefox to ~/.local/share/applications/firefox.desktop

I came acrossed a proper solution here. In short, I fired up Firefox Developer, ran xprop WM_CLASS in the terminal, clicked the Firefox window, and added the entry to firefox.desktop

My final file looks like this:

[Desktop Entry]
Comment=Browse the World Wide Web
Terminal=false
Name=Firefox Developer Browser
Exec=~/Preview/firefox-developer/firefox --profile ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default %U
Type=Application
Icon=~/Preview/firefox-developer/browser/icons/mozicon128.png
Categories=Network;
StartupWMClass=Firefox

Exercise - Repeating the process for Earlybird (Thunderbird Alpha)

1. Go to the Thunderbird Release Channel and grab the package for Earlybird (or the the Beta, if you choose):

   

   Or, from the command line:

   cd ~/Preview`
   wget https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/nightly/latest-comm-aurora/thunderbird-51.0a2.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2`
   tar -xvf thunderbird-51.0a2.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2 -C thunderbird
   

If you use Thunderbird already, determine your profile: ls ~/.thunderbird/*.default

2. Create the desktop entry, ~/.local/share/applications/thunderbird.desktop, with the following contents:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Thunderbird
Comment=Send and receive mail with Thunderbird
Type=Application
Exec=~/Preview/thunderbird/thunderbird --profile ~/.thunderbird/xxxxxxxx.default %u
Icon=~/Preview/thunderbird/chrome/icons/default/default256.png
Categories=Network;
StartupWMClass=Thunderbird

Replace xxxxxxxx.default with your profile.

For any other application like this, I would just copy firefox.desktop to myapplication.desktop and adjust the contents to suit your needs. Then, in general, launch the application and run xprop WM_CLASS to determine the value to put in the StartupWMClass= field.