1282565 - Consider allowing users to override behavior when applications specify a link should open in same tab

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Swarnava Sengupta (:Swarnava)]

Currently when a user click multiple link from a third-party app like whatsapp, telegram etc, it opens every link on same tabs.

Expected Behavior:

It should open multiple link on different tabs like tab queue does.

Comment 1

[:Margaret Leibovic]

Unfortunately I believe this is something that the app specifies as part of the intent it launches, and we're honoring what the app requested. I can't find the bug where we implemented this, but Mike should know more.

Comment 2

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

To be more explicit, the STR I see is:

1) Open whatsapp
2) Go to a conversation with a hyperlink
3) Click the hyperlink, open in Firefox
4) Return to whatsapp via the recent apps switcher
5) click the link again, open in firefox

Expected: opens the link in a new tab
Actual: opens the link in the same tab the previous link was opened in (i.e. no new tab is created)

Is this correct?

As Margaret mentions, this is an application-defined behavior. However, there are various flags that allow apps to bypass the behavior and we may have gotten it wrong. If we got it wrong, I'd expect Chrome to act differently.

Do you see the same behavior in Chrome?

Also, I'd prefer to not use my personal phone number to create an account to test this out in whatsapp & telegram – do you have other applications that you can reproduce this issue with? fwiw, I could not reproduce this in kakao talk.

Comment 3

[Swarnava Sengupta (:Swarnava)]

(In reply to Michael Comella (:mcomella) from comment #2)
> To be more explicit, the STR I see is:
> 
> 1) Open whatsapp
> 2) Go to a conversation with a hyperlink
> 3) Click the hyperlink, open in Firefox
> 4) Return to whatsapp via the recent apps switcher
> 5) click the link again, open in firefox
> 
> Expected: opens the link in a new tab
> Actual: opens the link in the same tab the previous link was opened in (i.e.
> no new tab is created)
> 
> Is this correct?
> 
> As Margaret mentions, this is an application-defined behavior. However,
> there are various flags that allow apps to bypass the behavior and we may
> have gotten it wrong. If we got it wrong, I'd expect Chrome to act
> differently.
> 
> Do you see the same behavior in Chrome?
> 
> Also, I'd prefer to not use my personal phone number to create an account to
> test this out in whatsapp & telegram – do you have other applications that
> you can reproduce this issue with? fwiw, I could not reproduce this in kakao
> talk.

On Chrome, I am getting same behavior like Firefox is doing.

Btw you can sign up on Telegram which is pretty privacy friendly compared to Whatsapp :D

we have tons of groups on Telegram where Mozillians(including staffs) hangouts, share ideas :)

I will look around and let you know if i find any other app.

Comment 4

[Swarnava Sengupta (:Swarnava)]

btw https://wiki.mozilla.org/Telegram

Comment 5

[Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian; :pocmo)]

This has annoyed me too in the past (using hangouts). I'm wondering who should be in control here: The app developer of the third-party app with a link or should I, the user of the browser, decide how tabs should be used.

Comment 6

[Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian; :pocmo)]

For reference: We implemented this in bug 840574.

Comment 7

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

(In reply to Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian) from comment #5)
> This has annoyed me too in the past (using hangouts). I'm wondering who
> should be in control here: The app developer of the third-party app with a
> link or should I, the user of the browser, decide how tabs should be used.

My understanding is that the calling app has the context to do the expected behavior (e.g. Is this a link to your inbox? Same tab. Is this a news article? New tab.), but apparently they take the expected action for our use case (but what about all users?). It is unfortunate that listening to the calling app (for these apps) puts the blame on Firefox (e.g. why this bug was filed).

With that in mind, in the interest of making Firefox not look bad and empowering the user, we could provide a prompt or option to override how the intents are handled. However, this would require some testing – some apps expect their requested behavior to be respected [0]. Since we don't know which app called us, we can't special-case them.

Since this sounds like it requires more effort than I think we should invest [1], I'm going to WONTFIX. Feel free to reopen if you disagree.

---
[0]: I once saw a use case where an app opened a tab in the browser for SSO that went back to the previous app (via an intent uri), then opened the desired content in the same tab, clearing the SSO. It would be unexpected, and potentially breaking if the SSO page makes async requests, for the SSO tab to remain open.

[1]: I don't think this feature would compel users to switch to or from Firefox, particularly when the competition does the same thing. Instead, we could spend that time building features that would compel users to use Firefox.

Comment 8

[:Margaret Leibovic]

I think this is something Barbara should think about. If users don't know about the implementation details, and they assume that Firefox is being annoying, I feel like it's our responsibility to deal with improving the experience.

IIRC, we prioritized bug 840574 because it was a partner requirement, but we didn't actually ship a distribution with that partner, so we should be free to change our minds if we want.

Comment 9

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

De-prioritizing this for now, but agree with everyone that we should be the ones to improve user experience.