update browser desktop files

update-browser-desktop-files

Simple script to restore browser command line parameters after software update

I use Ubuntu 24.04 with VAAPI for hardware video decoding on my browsers. To enable hardware decoding in Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge on Linux, you need to add command line parameters ("--enable-features=VaapiVideoDecoder,VaapiVideoEncoder,VaapiVideoDecodeLinuxGL). For Chromium and Brave, it's --enable-features=AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxGL. To make these permanent, you can put them at the end of lines starting with "Exec" in their .desktop files

This is straightforward enough, but the problem is, whenever there is a software update to any of these browsers, its .desktop file is overwritten so you have to do it again. You can put the updated desktop files at ~/.local/share/applications where they override the originals and are not overwritten, but every now and again an update changes the path to the browser icon so the browser button disappears! After getting fed up with this, I decided to write this script.

Run it and it will ensure that any Exec lines in the listed desktop files that don't end in the required parameters will have them appended, Any that still do have them will be left alone. The updated file will be copied to ~/.local/share/applications where it will override the originally installed .desktop file. As it will be unaffected by subsequent updates, the VAAPI parameters will survive them, but sometimes icon paths etc are changed in updates, which would require this script to be re-run to take account of that.

Setting up the script

The desktopFiles arrays should have corresponding command line parameters which are applied to all desktop files listed in that array. The arrays should contain the full paths of all the browser desktop files you want to be able to keep the corresponding command line parameters on. Mine are :-

For Browsers based on Chromium >= version 131

declare -a desktopFiles=("/var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/brave_brave.desktop"
                         "/var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/chromium_chromium.desktop"
                         "/usr/share/applications/microsoft-edge.desktop"
                         "/usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop")

params="--enable-features=AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxZeroCopyGL,AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxGL,AcceleratedVideoEncoder"

For browsers based on Chromium < version 131

declare -a desktopFiles2=()  # None now, all browsers upgraded to version 131

params2="--enable-features=VaapiVideoDecoder,VaapiVideoEncoder,VaapiVideoDecodeLinuxGL"

The params variables are set to the parameters you want to ensure are appended to the Exec lines in the files listed in the corresponding array. The processDeskTopFiles function is called with the required Exec line parameters as the first argument and the desktop files path array as the second, as below :-

processDeskTopFiles $params "${desktopFiles[@]}"
processDeskTopFiles $params2 "${desktopFiles2[@]}"

Running the script

Run the script using your user account :-

./update-desktop-files.sh

That's it!