138809 - Open in New Tab Missing from Right Click Menu on <select> Options

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(SeaMonkey :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[Felix Miata]

2002041908 OS/2 trunk

To reproduce:
1-Open indicated URL
2-Open a picklist at top of page
3-Right click a list item

Actual behavior:
1-No option to open in new tab

Expected behavior:
1-Option to open in new tab is present

Comment 1

[Kai Lahmann (is there, where MNG is)]

how should Mozilla even guess, that this will ask as a link..?!? INVALID

Comment 2

[John Levon]

Yes KaiL I think so.

Comment 3

[Felix Miata]

Excuse me, but what kind of explanation is that? Mozilla knows to open a page
selected in the dropdown. If it can do that, it should be able to do it in a new
tab.

Comment 4

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Mozilla does not in fact know that at the point when you click on the
dropdown... Knowing that is equivalent to solving the halting problem (in other
words, impossible without actually running the code that would run when the item
is selected).  This is computationally very expensive, would make the context
menu _incredibly_ slow to come up, and would still fail in many cases (eg, the
silly thing could act as a link or not based on output of a random-number
generator).

So I'm afraid this is wontfix.  Please feel free to reopen if you can present a
consistent way to detect which actions will "act as links" (whatever the hell
that may mean; is a document.open(); document.write(); document.close(); acting
as a link?).

If you want a pref to have all location.replace() calls open new windows/tabs
instead of using the current window, that's a separate issue, and you should
file a bug on that.  I suspect that that is not what you want, though....

Comment 5

[Felix Miata]

Thanks for usable explanation. RFE bug 138860 filed. I made no mention of
location.replace() or any other programmerspeak, since I'm not a programmer and
don't know what it means. Hopefully the summary will be understood both by mere
mortals and by programmers and findable in a query.

Comment 6

[jag (Peter Annema)]

Let me try to explain this a little.

The <select> itself doesn't know anything about urls. In fact, the reason those
items are loaded in the current page is that when you select an item from the
<select>'s list, some javascript code is executed that takes a url corresponding
to the item and tells the browser to load this url in the current page.

To implement the behaviour you're requesting, we would have to write code that
analyzes what happens when the selection of a <select> changes, which in this
case means analyzing the javascript code that gets executed to determine if that
code tells the browser to load a url (it can do this in a number of ways).

We might be able to make this work for the common case (like Boris said, there
are cases where we can't determine what will happen), but the cost of making it
work is too great.

Comment 7

[jag (Peter Annema)]

Btw, it looks like the site mentioned got changed. If you right-click on one of
the items in the menu at the top of the site, you'll now get both "open in new
window" and "open in new tab" (suggesting that they are actual links).

Comment 8

[Felix Miata]

Private evangelizing caused the webmaster to change the menu script. Note
however, that if the browser is narrower than the menu, that a horizontal
scrollbar appears, and yet, the leftmost menu item displays no text and does not
work.

Why shouldn't possibly fixing this be P5 futured? Maybe the cost couldn't and/or
shouldn't be covered presently, but what about down the road?

An ordinary user only knows the context menu and links are inconsistent. He
doesn't know why sometimes links can be opened in new window or tab from context
menu and other times not. We should try to remove the UI inconsistency, even if
such a fix must wait quite a while.

Comment 9

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Let me put it quite plainly.  In this case "quite a while" is "longer than the
average life expectancy of a contributor to the project".  Given that, I think
leaving the bug open and making it look like it would be fixed sometime would be
dishonest in the extreme.

Comment 10

[Felix Miata]

Wouldn't P5 with no milestone set keep people from holding their breath?