1217526 - Define applications where Tab Queue should be triggered

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Barbara Bermes [:barbara] - NI please!]

I have Tab Queues enabled in Nightly and love it, except for the "always on" behaviour. For example, there are situations where I click on a link inside an app and want to have this opened in Firefox right away and don't want it queued. I know I can use the "Open now" and understand that I made the choice of queuing things by enabling it but I was wondering if I could customize this more granular, i.e. TB on for, e.g. Twitter but off for my mail program etc.

I believe mfinkle mentioned it's not possible but wanted to still file this bug to keep track of the feature request.

Comment 1

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

(In reply to Barbara Bermes [:barbara] from comment #0)
> I have Tab Queues enabled in Nightly and love it, except for the "always on"
> behaviour. For example, there are situations where I click on a link inside
> an app and want to have this opened in Firefox right away and don't want it
> queued. I know I can use the "Open now" and understand that I made the
> choice of queuing things by enabling it but I was wondering if I could
> customize this more granular, i.e. TB on for, e.g. Twitter but off for my
> mail program etc.
> 
> I believe mfinkle mentioned it's not possible but wanted to still file this
> bug to keep track of the feature request.

It's not possible to have applications open Firefox different ways. We could explore using a whitelist/blocklist approach. We might be able to add a way to allow for saying "always open directly in firefox from this app", where "this app" is the app you just open a link from. The problem with this approach, I'm guessing, is that Android may not let Firefox know which app is sending the Intent. We'd need to make sure Firefox could know that Twitter was sending the Intent, and then act accordingly.

Besides a potential technical issue with getting the referrer app, this idea also adds complexity to the feature. We'd need to be sure that this idea layers easily onto the Tab Queue flow.

Comment 2

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

(In reply to Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) from comment #1)
> The problem with this approach, I'm guessing, is that Android may not
> let Firefox know which app is sending the Intent.

Correct – there is nothing built into Android that lets you know what the calling app is. One reason for this is to prevent DoS attacks by certain apps where they would refuse to open other apps.

However, if the calling app wishes, they can declare themselves in the Intent extras (e.g. some browsers, including us, do in EXTRA_APPLICATION_ID) but even if certain apps do declare this, we can't guarantee these apps will continue supporting this feature or that other applications don't spoof the same ID, potentially causing problems that would make Firefox look bad.

I don't think this is actionable.

Comment 3

[BMO Automation]

We have completed our launch of our new Firefox on Android. The development of the new versions use GitHub for issue tracking. If the bug report still reproduces in a current version of [Firefox on Android nightly](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix) an issue can be reported at the [Fenix GitHub project](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/). If you want to discuss your report please use [Mozilla's chat](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix#Connect_to_Matrix) server https://chat.mozilla.org and join the [#fenix](https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fenix:mozilla.org) channel.