117681 - Clicking middle button opens empty new tab

Status: VERIFIED WORKSFORME

(SeaMonkey :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[Jens Kager]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:0.9.7) Gecko/20011221
BuildID:    2001122106

Mozilla opens an empty new tab after a middle-click although it was only text
which was clicked, not a real link. The source contains the an anchor tag (<a
name=#b target=_blank>) which isn't closed. Thus Mozilla considers everything
after it a link and opens a new tab (for some reason it doesn't open a new
window when "Middle-click" is activated under "Tabbed Browsing"). That's
probably not really a bug, but it's annoying nonetheless.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Activate "Middle-click or control-click of links in a Web page" under "Tabbed
Browsing".
2. Middle-click on some text at the given URL.

Actual Results:  Mozilla opens an empty new tab.

Expected Results:  Nothing should have happened as no link has been clicked.

Comment 1

[Chris Veenboer]

Reproducible on Win2K SP2 Build 2002011803, both on unclosed "<a name" tags and
closed ones.

Comment 2

[Chris Veenboer]

Attachment: testcase for open and closed <a name tags

middle-clicking on either "foo" or "bar" opens a new empty tab

Comment 3

[Michael Gabriel]

confirming 2002020406 win2k, is this a bug or a feature
it should atleast open the same page and jump to the anchor,
or not react to the click at all

Comment 4

[Michael Lefevre]

I cannot reproduce this using the testcase or with other pages - WFM using
1.0RC3 on Win2000.

reporter (Jens), or anyone, can you reproduce this bug with a recent build of
Mozilla?

Comment 5

[Mikko Virkkilä]

I can confirm it on linux RC3 (build 2002052309), but with even weirder results. 

It's not really that simple as to only trying to load the text you click on, it
can also try to load the text from your current clipboard or any text that is
highlighted. I'm seeing very similar problems with Bug 149232. 

When I middle click on a text my tab/window starts thinking:
- "hey someone middle-clicked so we better load that url"
- "hey, there is no url there! let's check if anything is highlighted and then
check the clipboard"
- "Something is highlighted, we'll just stupidly asume it's an url and load it"
OR
- "We found some stuff on the clipboard, we'll try to load that as an url!"

Maybe Bug 149232 is a duplicate of this one? It seems to me that both bugs are
simply a result of a middle-click event being sent, and the routines that take
care of middle clicks handle them wrong. 

Comment 6

[Dave Fennell]

I don't think this is really to do with tabs or anchor tags - If you middle
click *anywhere* on a HTML page mozilla tries to load a new page with some
random junk in the URL (I can't see a pattern).

Interestingly if you don't have tabs on when you middle click it changes the URL
of the current window, rather than opening a new window and putting the random
URL in that.

Comment 7

[Dave Fennell]

A friend of mine has just explained that this is actually a feature.

How it is supposed to work is that you highlight a URL somewhere (anywhere, in a
console, in an icq message etc) then when you middle click in the Mozilla window
the browser opens that URL.

I'm pretty sure this explains the behaviour from my last comment, does it
explain this bug though?

Comment 8

[Vidar Haarr (not reading bugmail)]

Even if it is a feature, it doesn't work now.
Clicking the middle-button on the text 'Foo' does nothing ('middle-click opens
in new tab' is enabled).

WinXP trunk build 2002071108.

Comment 9

[Vidar Haarr (not reading bugmail)]

Dave: thats the linux behavior; you copy a URL to the clipboard, highlight
mozilla, and middleclick somewhere. Mozilla should then open the URL in a new tab.
It's not related to this bug.

Comment 10

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

mass-verifying WorksForMe bugs.

reopen only if this bug is still a problem with a *recent trunk build*.

mail search string for bugspam: AchilleaMillefolium