On Thu May 4 02:01:31 2023 +0000, Paul Gofman wrote:
Doesn't this look too invasive and dangerous? Windows apps just love registering handles for anything. IMO there should be an explicit confirmation somewhere if user wants that.
Firefox and Chrome both prompt for confirmation before opening a link in an external program. Associating applications with custom protocols is actually less dangerous than associating applications with file types (which Wine has been doing for the past 15 years), because the user does have to explicitly confirm that they want to use the program to open the link.
The big motivation for this patch is that there are certain games/programs (like Roblox) that depend on this kind of web browser integration. Maybe someone could get Roblox working in Wine Internet Explorer, but the user experience would be much much worse than in a native web browser.
This patch also doesn't change the fact that Wine has internally supported protocol associations for a very long time, it just hasn't advertised those associations to the host desktop environment. The one case I can think of where it might be annoying is if you install a web browser in Wine then it would appear as an option in the host desktop environment for opening http and https links. However, if you installed a web browser in Wine it's probably because you liked that browser better than your native web browser, so I think it's reasonable to offer desktop integration for it. (By the way, Wine Internet Explorer is already excluded from desktop integration by default.)