Sudden Firefox icon in system tray, like a pinned launcher

[zorael]

I suddenly get tray icons for some programs that are not running. I have seen this with (at least) Firefox and Telegram.

If I right-click them, it offers to quit the program. If I left-click one, it starts the program. Once the program is running the icon disappears.

Selecting the quit option does nothing. To hide them without starting them, I have to enter the settings for the system tray and pick never show (disabled) for their entries.

(Firefox does not come with a tray icon as a feature.)

I don’t remember changing any plasma settings at all recently. What could this be?

Operating System: Aurora 44
KDE Plasma Version: 6.7.3
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.28.0
Qt Version: 6.11.1
Kernel Version: 7.1.3-201.fc44.x86_64 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 12 × 13th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-1365U
Memory: 34 GB of RAM (33,3 GB usable)
Graphics Processor: Intel® Iris® Xe Graphics
Manufacturer: LENOVO
Product Name: 21HMCTO1WW
System Version: ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 11

[pg-tips]

Possibly related thread and bug report?

It still seems unclear (from what I can make out) why some users get this issue and some don’t.

KDE 6.7 Background App

Hi everyone, I’m running KDE Plasma on Arch Linux. Since updating to Plasma 6.7, every time I launch a Flatpak-installed application an icon for that app appears in the system tray. I believe this is caused by the new “Background apps” feature. The problem is that the icon shows up even for applications that don’t actually run in the background — for example Postman or LibreOffice. As soon as I close the app, the icon disappears. Is this the expected behavior? I find it pretty annoying, and I…

521540 – Plasma 6.7 "Background Apps" causes unexpected new or duplicated...

[Gaurav]

I have seen this happen with flatpak apps.
I use zen browser, its a flatpak, and when I launch the app it usually pops up the icon in tray, once the app is open the icon disappears.

This also happens with other flatpak apps.
I dont know how to disable it, but if you wanna hide it (like a temporary solution), then you can open the system tray drawer, which is a > icon on the last position.

There you can find a pencil edit icon at top right corner where you can choose what to disable, only show when relevant, hide forever etc.

Remember this menu will only display the firefox item if the icon is currently showing in the system tray, if it disappears then it’ll not be in that list.

As for what is happening, I think some kind of process in backend is pinging firefox or firefox itself has some sort of a background timer or something running for notifications etc…
Which is telling the system that firefox is running in bg, hence DE showing the icon.

Its probably a convinience thing that the DE is giving you an option to quit the app because no window exist (of the app) to quit it.

Thats my guess.