234311 - Opening URL opens locally saved copy

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Bert Van Vreckem]

User-Agent:       
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040207 Firefox/0.8

When clicking a http link in Thunderbird, instead of opening the url in the
webbrowser, a locally saved copy is opened.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open Thunderbird
2. Click the Mozilla Thunderbird Help link in the welcome page


Actual Results:  
A browser window (Firefox in my case) was opened and the address bar points to a
local file: "file:///tmp/cgsxshyp-1". No graphics or style sheets are loaded
and, of course, relative links don't work.

Expected Results:  
The link in the welcome page pointed to http://texturizer.net/thunderbird/, so
that's the page I expect to be opened, not a locally saved copy.

I use a slightly modified version of the openURL script described in Bug 226071.

This bug is related to Bug 216252 and Bug 226071, but TMHO, not a duplicate...

Comment 1

[John Gross]

I can confirm this and add the following. When this link clicked from a TB
e-mail: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/11/politics/campaign/11ELEC.html?th

This page appears to download:
http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/11/politics/campaign/11ELEC.html&OQ=th

Then FF 0.8 displays it with this path:
file:///home/john/tmp/login (I confirmed w/script capture this is actually the
url passed to FF)

Which is a NYT registration page which is downloaded and cached. Clicking on
login fails because links are relative. Subsequent error message again mentions
a path to my /tmp directory. I might consider this an NYT html problem EXCEPT:

When first link is entered into FF location bar AND I'm logged into NYT site
then I go directly to webpage. When entered into location bar AND not logged
into site then I get the registration/login webpage, BUT THE PATH IS CORRECTLY
THE NYT LINK above and clicking on login sends you to webpage. Means to me that
FF and the NYT code is probably OK.

Second case is when I received an e-mail from MozillaZine this morn indicating
activity on the following thread. When I clicked (in e-mail):
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=376808#376808

The following page was loaded and displayed in FF:
file:///home/john/tmp/viewtopic.php

The links on the MozillaZine page are relative, eg, the "MozillaZine Forum
Index" link in top left corner of page becomes:
file:///home/john/tmp/index.php?sid=4350ecd519fb3bc0f94e23b18da38f8f

I never get prompted to tell TB how to handle the php file (which is opened by
FF) BUT I DID GET PROMPTED on how to handle html file. The attachments config
option in TB doesn't allow manual entry of helper apps only editing of ones
already in list. The problem here doesn't appear to be passing a url to FF and
launching it, that works. The problem seems to be that "under certain
conditions" the wrong urls are being passed. I'm thinking that the initial
request for a page is correctly sent to the website but "under certain
conditions" that page gets cached in /tmp and TB is altering the url passed to
FF. I also use Fluxbox 0.9.8 in case there is a window manager/desktop manager
dependence.

See MozillaZine Forums -> Mozilla Thunderbird Support -> Mail Link Doesn't Open
to Browser (last update on 15 feb 2004)

Regards,
John G.
_________________
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040207 Firefox/0.8
Mozilla Thunderbird 0.5 (20040208)
Asus A7N8X-X, Athlon 2800+, 512M, Leadtek A350TDH,
Logitech MX-700, Viewsonic VX900, Mandrake 9.1, Fluxbox

Comment 2

[Angus McMorland]

I can also confirm this bug, in thunderbird 0.5-20040208, Debian testing (but
with mozilla-downloaded binaries). It seems that URLs in emails, without
exception, get downloaded and the address to the local copy sent to firefox to
display. 

Using a small shell script, as suggested in 

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/linuxurls.html

..., I can see that the URL parameter ($1 or $url in the above page's example
script) sent to my script is the path to the LOCAL file:
"/tmp/<name-of-remote-file>" or "/tmp/<tmp-filename>" or similar. 

I'm running Enlightement as my window-manager, with no Gnome or KDE or such, and
I notice that another of the commentors for this bug is also running a non-Gnome
window manager. Could this somehow be the problem. I feel that
thunderbird/firefox working correctly should NOT be dependent on Gnome.

Comment 3

[Jens Fallesen]

I can confirm the behaviour: Thunderbird calls whatever browser/helper is
defined linking to a local copy of the link in question. This really is useless.

Tested on Thunderbird version 0.6+ (20040520), clean build. Running on FreeBSD
5.2.1, gnome2.6.1, metacity 2.8.1.

This happens no matter whether the xremote script is defined as preferred web
browser in Gnome or explicitly defined in Thunderbird.

Comment 4

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

*** Bug 239311 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 5

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

*** Bug 249932 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 6

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 7

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.