Opening the browser is blocking (Arch Linux, Firefox)

[jbirnick]

Suppose I use open::that("https://github.com"). I'm on Arch Linux, on Wayland (hyprland). This function is supposed to open my Firefox with the given URL.

When a Firefox instance is already open, it works fine. When no Firefox instance is open yet, it will open one and also open the URL in there, so that works too. However, in the latter case, the function will block, and not finish until I close the Firefox instance.

In the docs it says that it shouldn't block. Any idea what's going on?

[Byron]

That's true, it doesn't block and this is the intention. However, all it does is to start a launcher-program, relying on it also performing as advertised.
Not all launchers do that.

There is also launch_in_background() which puts an extra thread between you and possibly malfunctioning launcher, maybe this works more reliably (despite leaking resources possibly)?

[jbirnick]

I don't think the launcher (like xdg-open) makes any guarantees regarding blocking. I can't find any resource where it says it shouldn't block. In fact, I find the opposite: it says there are no guarantees regarding blocking. Could you please point me to the launcher guarantees that you are mentioning?

[Byron]

That's true, it probably never advertises anything except that open treats every launcher as non-blocking, coming from MacOS' open initially.

Maybe there is flags that make it non-blocking? Maybe it should be removed or the priority changed so that non-blocking launchers can take precedence? Maybe it even has a dry-run mode that can be coerced into launching the application directly, dealing with the non-blocking part directly?

[jbirnick]

No I don't think you can change the launcher. Sorry, but I think this mistake is on you. You shouldn't say in your docs that the function is non-blocking if you can't guarantee that..