1335102 - Allow extension overriden newtab to navigate to built-in new tab page

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1269456

(WebExtensions :: Frontend, defect)

Description

[Wojciech Walek [:wojwal]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/55.0.2883.87 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I am testing "chrome_url_overrides" feature in WebExtension:

    "chrome_url_overrides": {
        "newtab": "newtab.html"
    }

Works fine. From inside overridden newtab page - in certain cases I'm trying to show standard firefox newtab page (about:newtab). What I tried:
 - window.location.href = 'about:newtab', or
 - chrome.tabs.update(tab.id, {url: 'about:newtab'});

I also tried chrome://browser/content/newtab/newTab.xhtml


Actual results:

It doesn't work - and shows error in browser console:

Unchecked lastError value: Error: Illegal URL: about:newtab

or

Unchecked lastError value: Error: Illegal URL: chrome://browser/content/newtab/newTab.xhtml


Expected results:

It should allow redirect to standard about:newtab page. 

Redirecting to "about:home" works fine - no issues... I guess it should be the same for about:newtab page.

There is no way to programatically unset "chrome_url_overrides" - and in my case I give an option to user to disable it - and this is my way to show standard newtab page. In all cases tiny "newtab.html" is loaded with just few lines of javascript that makes decision to load:
 - my own custom newtab page, or
 - standard browser newtab page

Comment 1

[:shell escalante]

looking for dupe - kris