VMware Horizon/View on Ubuntu and Firefox

I’ve been running Linux on my main laptop for a while now, first Debian (Kali) and now Ubuntu 18.04.1. Since Firefox updated to their “Quantum” rebuild, I haven’t been able to use my work’s VMWare View environment, which is a bit annoying. There was an issue I reported here on the VMWare forums with handling the vmware-view:// URI for some reason.

Since a workmate had recently replaced his Mac with a Ubuntu laptop, I offered him lunch to try his hand at working it out. Thankfully, food is a good motivator for some ;)

We’ve figured out the issue, it seems to come down to how Firefox is handling the link in the first place. Our VMWare environment’s linked through an F5 APM install, which seems to just trigger Firefox’s dumb mode.

This has been tested with the Horizon 4.8.x and 4.10.x clients and Firefox v64.0. Both are 64bit versions, running on Ubuntu 18.04.1

Download the client from the VMWare Horizon Client for 64-bit Linux.
In Firefox, open about:config and click through the warning.
Add a new boolean entry called network.protocol-handler.expose.vmware-view and set the value to false
Create a file called test.html somewhere on your computer and put the following in it: <html><a href='vmware-view://example.com'>test</a></html> (Or just click here)
Open the file in Firefox and click on the link, which should prompt you for a path to open it.
Select /usr/bin/vmware-view and it should work for future uses! :)

I guess I owe Meekee lunch now. :)