Comment 8 for bug 867424

Firefox still depends on libgnome and libgnomeui (specifically, GnomeClient - see toolkit/xre/nsNativeAppSupportUnix.cpp) for talking to the session manager. The problem with this is:

1) Those are both deprecated, and have been for a long time
2) They have quite heavy dependencies on a lot of other deprecated libraries (orbit, bonobo, gnomevfs, gconf, glade, gnomecanvas)

We dropped these entirely from the default install in Ubuntu, and this now results in Firefox not shutting down cleanly when users log out of their session (leading to the "Well, this is embarassing" screen when they next start Firefox.

Unfortunately, there isn't really a good replacement for GnomeClient, but the options are:

1) Use the gnome-session DBus interface directly. However, this won't work outside of gnome.
2) Use libsm directly to talk to the session managers xsmp interface, rather than relying on a higher level library. This is more work, but lighter dependencies and would work outside of gnome too.
3) Embed a copy of EggSMClient from http://git.gnome.org/browse/libegg/tree/libegg/ , which has a xsmp backend and is light on dependencies (just libsm AFAICT)

Gnome applications seem to do a combination of 1 and 3, but I think option 1 is a non-starter for us, as the dbus interface is completely gnome-specific and doesn't have any API stability guarantees. The only software I know which does 2 is metacity.

What do other people think?