browser app icon positioned incorrectly in macOS DMG installer window

In our ESR60-based builds the browser app icon is positioned incorrectly within the macOS DMG installer window. See ticket:24632#comment:14.

added TorBrowserTeam201810R component::applications/tor browser ff60-esr owner::tbb-team priority::medium resolution::fixed severity::normal status::closed tbb-8.0-issues tbb-backported type::defect labels

#26571 (moved) is a duplicate.

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Cc: N/A to pastly

More tickets for July.

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Keywords: TorBrowserTeam201806 deleted, TorBrowserTeam201807 added

Move our tickets to August.

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Keywords: TorBrowserTeam201807 deleted, TorBrowserTeam201808 added

Moving our tickets to September 2018

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Keywords: TorBrowserTeam201808 deleted, TorBrowserTeam201809 added

Moving tickets to October

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Keywords: TorBrowserTeam201809 deleted, TorBrowserTeam201810 added

#27957 (moved) is a duplicate.

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Keywords: N/A deleted, tbb-8.0-issues added
Cc: pastly to pastly, Ralph

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Description: In our ESR60-based builds the browser app icon is positioned incorrectly within the DMG installer window. See ticket:24632#comment:14.

to

In our ESR60-based builds the browser app icon is positioned incorrectly within the macOS DMG installer window. See ticket:24632#comment:14.
Summary: browser app icon positioned incorrectly in DMG installer window to browser app icon positioned incorrectly in macOS DMG installer window

I saw this in action recently and it looks awful. IIRC the plan was to fix this with the new icons but there is no ETA for them. We should do this sooner. I guess the release in two weeks would be a good one.

Kathy and I worked on this ticket last week (it seemed like an easy one to fix). However, so far we have failed to produce a new .DS_Store file that fixes the icon positioning problem without introducing a new problem. Specifically, after we create a new .DS_Store file which fixes the positioning problem, the "drag to install" background image is not shown at all (we also created a new background image which includes the new Tor Browser logo, but it makes no difference is we use the old image or the new one).

We also do not know why this icon positioning problem occurs in Tor Browser 8 but not in 7.5.6.

The .DS_Store file format is undocumented and there are not many tools for working with it. To create the .DS_Store file we tried both manual methods (i.e., use the Finder to set up everything correctly and then copy the resulting .DS_Store to the Tor Browser build) and an open source tool named dmgbuild that can generate .DS_Store files.

Our best idea for what to do try next is to switch our DMG files to use an HFS+ file system inside (rather than the ISO 9660 one which we currently use). Mozilla made a similar switch a while ago for cross-compiled builds; see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1197325#c1 for an idea of what is involved. Our hope is that switching to HFS+ will fix the missing background problem and also give us other benefits such as the ability to use a custom volume icon (which is shown on the macOS desktop after you open a DMG).

We may need some help from boklm with the rbm changes that will be required, and there is also a risk that changing to HFS+ will result in larger DMG files.

We thought of another idea and it is looking promising: manually creating a new .DS_Store file in the Finder on an old version of macOS works (I think that is how Kathy and I created the one we used for the alpha builds which included the sandbox profiles). Using that approach I think we can quickly create something that will work.

Here is a fix (which also fixes #25151 (moved)): https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/brade/tor-browser-build.git/commit/?h=bug26263-01&id=8043f2546a8b24a6cead0e0e18e8053e490fc4b3

I will attach a screenshot to show what the new macOS installer window looks like.

Kathy and I think we should try this in the alpha series first in case there are unforeseen problems. One issue that we know about is that on really old macOS systems (e.g., 10.6.x) the larger (@2x) image is used from background.tiff even on a @1x display. This is ugly, but since we only support macOS 10.9 and newer (which should handle the background correctly), it seems worthwhile to ignore that problem.

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Cc: pastly, Ralph to pastly, Ralph, steph, antonela
Keywords: TorBrowserTeam201810 deleted, TorBrowserTeam201810R added
Status: new to needs_review

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new macOS installer

I just realized that my screenshot shows the .app extension. That is not displayed by default; on our Macs, Kathy and I always turn on the Finder's "Show all filename extensions" preference.

Also, I forgot to mention that inside the .DS_Store file we set the window position to x=15, y=10,000. The y is measured from the bottom of the main display and the Finder is smart enough to not open the window off the top of the display, so this trick causes the installer window to be displayed near the top-left corner of the main display.

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Cc: pastly, Ralph, steph, antonela to Ralph, steph, antonela

yess \o/ thanks a lot for working on this!

I inspected the changes and they look good to me. Can anyone not being mcs/brade test the resulting .dmg and report back whether it looks good:

https://people.torproject.org/~gk/testbuilds/TorBrowser-tbb-nightly-osx64_en-US.dmg https://people.torproject.org/~gk/testbuilds/TorBrowser-tbb-nightly-osx64_en-US.dmg.asc

FWIW: I thought we already have a bug for adapting the volume icon somewhere (I am sure I always wanted to get that fixed) but I did not find it. Mentioning https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1197325 there would be a good idea.

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Looks great on my end. Attached screenshot. Thanks!