1365260 - Facebook disables opening photos in new tabs

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: DOM: UI Events & Focus Handling, defect, P3)

Description

[Lukas]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:53.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/53.0
Build ID: 20170504105526

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open any Facebook photo album, e. g. https://www.facebook.com/pg/mozilla/photos/?tab=album&album_id=10152771875182381

2. Click on any image with middle click, Ctrl click or Shift click.


Actual results:

Photo is opened in actual tab.


Expected results:

Photo should open in new tab (middle click, Ctrl click) or in new window (Shift click).

Comment 1

[Hani Yacoub, Desktop QA]

Build ID: 20170518030213
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:55.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/55.0

Reproducible on Windows 10 x 64, Mac OS X 10.12 and Ubuntu 16.04 x64.

Comment 2

[Andrew Overholt [:overholt]]

Does this happen in other browsers? I'm just wondering if this is something that Facebook changed on their end.

Comment 3

[Lukas]

(In reply to Andrew Overholt [:overholt] from comment #2)
> Does this happen in other browsers? I'm just wondering if this is something
> that Facebook changed on their end.

It's possible, but main problem is, that Firefox allows this. User will (opening link in background tab) should supersede JavaScript events on page. Ideally Firefox should not handle middle click as click event.

Comment 4

[Eric Tsai (no more review request accepted)]

My Chromium 58 on ubuntu 16.04 and Chrome on Mac OS X 10.12, clicking with ctrl(or command) or shift also open on the same window.

Comment 5

[Andrew Overholt [:overholt]]

(In reply to Eric Tsai from comment #4)
> My Chromium 58 on ubuntu 16.04 and Chrome on Mac OS X 10.12, clicking with
> ctrl(or command) or shift also open on the same window.

This seems to clarify that this is something Facebook is doing intentionally. I'll find some time to investigate.

Comment 6

[Andrew Overholt [:overholt]]

I haven't found the time to investigate. However, I'm interested in the thoughts of a few other people so I'm going to start an email thread. I'll report back.

Comment 7

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

That thread is at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform/wS46JJFF4Uc and I'll follow up there to avoid splitting the discussion.

Comment 8

[Andrew Overholt [:overholt]]

Thanks for linking to the conversation here, Boris.

It sounds like there's no good solution to comment 0 which doesn't also break other sites. It might be worth discussing this in the context of https://github.com/WICG/interventions but it might be more effective to ask Facebook to allow this use case.