Can Ubuntu 24.04 give me compact browser URLs on my desktop?

Support and Help
1

Hi All, I installed Ubuntu for my wife migrating from Windows. She only uses a PC for basic tasks. One fundamental use is browsing websites in Firefox and dragging important URLs to her desktop.

She’s not getting the same experience with Ubuntu. I’ve now managed to get Ubuntu to save URL sim links drag and dropping from the URL bar. I don’t mind not seeing images for the link, but displaying both the file and creation date just adds clutter. Can these sim links be automatically created showing just the file name without date? Thanks

2

Your File Manager preferences control that appearance.

On my system (Mate, not GNOME) it looks something like this. You should have something similar that you can tweak to how you want.

SNAPSHOT__FileManager_Preferences
SNAPSHOT__FileManager_Preferences688×600 36.1 KB

Just choose one of the three, and make the others “none” should do it.


Not sure if your current version of DM shows/uses the name “Files” or “Nautilus”, but using dconf-editor, for the following path

/org/gnome/nautilus/icon-view/

or maybe

/org/gnome/files/icon-view/

I see the following:

SNAPTSHOT__dconf-editor__icon-view
SNAPTSHOT__dconf-editor__icon-view860×479 47.2 KB

That “captions” line would reflect the values for each of the 3 drop-down choices that you saw in the first snapshot showing the display preferences.

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3

Thanks Eric. She has Ubuntu 24.04 LTS installed from memory stick image running as VM.

Under File preferences There are 2 options for Date & Time format, Simple/Detailed but no 3rd option to have nothing? Grid View captions: All 3 selections set to None. I don’t see your screenshots yet.

4

Can you make a screenshot to illustrate what you mean? Because icons on the desktop don’t usually show timestamps; wouldn’t even know if that’s possible.

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5

Please remember Ubunto 24 is running in Oracle VM Virtual Box. But I’ll also see if I get the same thing on a dual boot PC running Ubuntu stand alone. Anyway, I like the drag and drop of Firefox URLs on the desktop, it’s just the date I don’t need. Thanks

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6

Ahh, now I see what you mean. You can’t change that by any option in the file manager, I’m afraid. It’s some helper tool that embeds the creation time in the name, when dropping the URL on the desktop. I don’t know if there is an easily accessible way to change that logic. You can however just rename those links and delete the timestamp portion, after the fact. There might even be some scriptable solution; just need a regular expression for generic matching of those timestamp strings. That would be my stopgap solution until I’d find the place to change the naming scheme.

7

They say a picture is better than a thousand words. It looks like she’s not going to get the Windows drag & drop URL experience. The only thing I thought was to create a desktop file folder and drag URLs to that. If that works, lines of URLs in one folder would be tidier than blank icons littered on the desktop?

I’ve also tried copying URL links to a text file. But the problem is some URLs are very long and can run into a few lines, making the text file look really messy. Maybe one day somebody will understand some things in life have evolved, learned, and become intuitive, whatever device, operating system (Or car!) you choose.

Thanks for your help and explanation.

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8

I think the naming is actually created by Firefox itself, not by some third party tool…

What you could do is to engage some AI tool (or find a human to write it) to create you a script that parses such a file and turns it into a more pretty desktop file, then use the inotifywait tool from a user session service to watch a folder on the desktop where she can drop the files so that the tool automatically processes it (and turns it into a proper desktop entry) when she drops something there…

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9

I don’t think that’s how drag and drop works. The sending program (firefox) just puts data (the URL) into a buffer and the receiving program (in this case the compositor / window manager) decides what to do with it. On my XUbuntu I get a dialog when using d’n’d from the addressbar to the desktop which defaults to the title of the page as the name of the file and creates a desktop file with ‘Type=Link’.

Desktop Icons are not really well supported in Gnome, they are done by a Gnome Shell extension that is shipped with Ubuntu but is not officially part of Gnome. I can actually understand the Gnome developers since I’ve always found Desktop icons somewhat cumbersome (minimize everything to get at the desktop, find the icon, double click it, restore whatever programs you need visible …). If one is used to a workflow that heavily depends on having icons on the desktop then any flavour of Ubuntu besides the main one is a better fit.

For the particular use case I’d think about using bookmarks and possibly the bookmark bar in Firefox instead of desktop icons.

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10

FWIW, in GNOME they are actual HTML files:

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=https://ubuntu.com/" />
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

That’s what I get, when dropping ubuntu.com on the Desktop.

I second the suggestion with the bookmarks. The new Firefox home page, which opens by default when not providing a URL on startup, also has “Shortcuts” and “Recent activity”, so maybe they can be leveraged for this as well.

Also, on a more general note, expecting the same experience as on Windows is an exercise in frustration, usually. Plus, where is the line? Would you want a bug-for-bug reproduction of every brain-dead “feature”?

I, for one, have done away with desktop icons a long time ago, even when I still had to use Windows. They are a usability nightmare, because one has to search for the icon every single time; locking them to a grid is optional no less. :man_facepalming: I’ve seen Windows(!) desktops with so many icons that there was an overflow button. :zany_face:
A friend then showed me how to get a nice sorted list menu of the desktop integrated into the taskbar, which, in the end, just boils down to a plain folder view in list mode. From then on (decades, plural, ago) I had the desktop icons disabled, so as to not obstruct the view on the background image. :smiling_face_with_sunglasses:

Plus, the whole desktop icons idea is fraught with usability issues; need to resize/move/minimize app windows because they are in the way, which is just backwards, since the apps should get all the screen real estate available.

Don’t get me started on the whole overlapping windows folly. :grin:

While I don’t like everything about the GNOME experience, it is a vast improvement over Windows Desktop, IMHO. Think of GNOME more like a MacOS “rip-off”; it’s an appliance shop. The user is supposed to actually use the system and not get lost in customization, so there isn’t a(n easily reachable) tuning knob for every last aspect of the user experience (UX); you don’t go moving or repainting buttons on an appliance — think TV set, not app(lication). When you look at it that way and just accept that one size will never fit all but good enough most of the time, you’ll have a way more pleasant UX — you don’t return a Porsche just because the ignition is on the “wrong” side of the steering wheel. :wink:

11

Suggestion. Install Recoll for indexing your desktop content. And optionally Albert.

12

Thanks to All for replies, I’ll work through them. I can see there’s quite a lot of objection to icons on screen. I use dual monitors. There are many examples of digital devices interacting with humans where they have to re-learn something that doesn’t come naturally. When I see a desktop with icons, I scan it in milliseconds and my brain registers the positonal information, even if it’s just a placeholder with no image. I’m using that ‘picture map’’ to quickly navigate and enable functions without spending time reading text. I think of it as intuitive response, human actions that come automatically and aren’t language dependent. A level up from that is speech control.

I’ve worked with DOS scripts and like many others I’ve been brainwashed by Microsoft Windows and need to re-educate myself in the old ways. Now we have Alexa et Al, the communication interface has become more human friendly and intuitive.

13

I’ve worked out an intuitive ‘Solution’ : Accept that Ubuntu won’t give the same drag & drop user experience as Windows and work with what the browser app can do within its own window. Firefox can save Bookmarks and Shortcut links. Shortcut links with embedded icon image header can be enabled to appear on the Firefox home screen, but these are volatile and can be cleared. Bookmarks are in more permanent managed storage but access is not as convenient. However there’s a Chrome CSS script that shows Firefox bookmarks in a left side panel. What would be a drag & drop action to desktop for URLs becomes a Save as Bookmark. It’s still not as good as drag and drop on a dual monitor setup but she can live with it. Thanks for all your help and replies.

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14

The icons on the start screen aren’t quite as volatile as you think. If you click on the three horizontal dots which appear next to an icon when you position the mouse cursor over an icon, you get a menu with an option to pin the icon. Then the icon will stay there unless you intentionally remove it (same menu). There also is a way to change the start screen through a menu you get when clicking on the pen icon in the bottom right corner. Among other things you can set the number of lines of shortcuts there.

The way I’ve set it up, I get a screen with 32 (four lines of 8 icons) sites I visit regularly and no background image and no featured articles whenever I open a new tab. I’ve also got a bookmark toolbar active which has a ‘most visited’ menu button (10 links) ; so the links in the start screen are actually the second tier of regularly used sites.

15

In the standard GNOME desktop environment, you cannot directly drag and drop a URL from a browser address bar to the desktop to create a reusable icon. This functionality was removed because GNOME’s default file manager, Nautilus, no longer manages desktop icons.

The “fix” for that is an “extension”, namely

That can be installed using

sudo apt install gnome-shell-extension-desktop-icons-ng

Failing that approach, if you right-click on one of those “offending” icons, and choose “Properties”, you are presented with a window that allows you to

  • replace the string description of the icon, and

  • click on the displayed icon to get a pop-up file selector for an alternate choice of icon to display for that file.

The repository of Application-related icons is located here:

  • /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps

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16

Well, you did say standard GNOME, not Ubuntu GNOME. :grin:

So it’s already installed and probably what’s actually creating those HTML files when dropping a URL on the desktop; just open an editor, write a URL in there, select it and drap it to the desktop. If one wanted to change something about how exactly that’s done, one would probably have to start at Desktop Icons NG.

2 Likes
17

Thanks Peter. I’ve read all the replies and out of the box i.e a Ubuntu install with Firefox included, I haven’t been able to achieve URL drag and drop icons from Firefox URL bar. Neither can I open multiple instances of Firefox when I’m navigating several sites, but that’s a limitation of the OS.

I’ve explored creating links within Firefox as suggested , but they are only available on the Home page local URL. I can be navigating a tree of URLs and it’s not intuitive to keep moving off a web page back to the Home screen. I tend to set history options to clear at shutdown and regard history links as volatile, favorites do not clear. My wide screen monitors have plenty of space and Favorites displayed with url icons in a left side bar of adjustable width, will have to do for now.

18

More likely a limitation of the Firefox default settings

Do you have the Menu bar enabled?
Application Menu > More Tools > Customise Toolbar > Toolbars > Menu Bar Checkbox Ticked
File > New Window

19

No need for the menu bar just for that … ‘New Window’ is also in the ‘Hamburger’-menu and of course there are hot keys for that: ctrl-t for new tab, ctrl-n for new window and of course ctrl-w for close tab or window if there’s only one tab in the window; this will close Firefox completely if you’re closing the only tab in the only window …

Of course there are also options in the context menu if you right click on a link to open in either a new tab or a new window; for opening in a new tab you can also click on the link with the middle mouse button - at least that’s the default behaviour, which might be overridden by an add-on.

20

Ah, yes, I see it now - hidden in plain sight
I’ve used that menu a gazillion times and failed to read it comprehensively

Just goes to show how we become set in our own ways… :upside_down_face: