1362870 - Tabs opening endlessly after pdf download

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 218257

(Firefox :: File Handling, defect)

Description

[azad.tasan]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:53.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/53.0
Build ID: 20170504105526

Steps to reproduce:

All I need to do to reproduce this bug is CTRL-click a link to a PDF that is then downloaded (example: https://www.math.tu-berlin.de/studienfachberatung_mathematik/master/scientific_computing/, CTRL-click on "Studienordnung Master Scientific Computing (...)")


Actual results:

Tabs keep opening without anything in them, the Firefox window keeps attracting focus so I cannot use the Task Manager or anything else, the only thing that makes it stop is closing the entire application, closing single tabs or windows does not make it stop (tabs keep being opened in a different window if I close the first one).


Expected results:

PDF should be opened in a new tab or perhaps downloaded, I don't know which of those exactly.

Comment 1

[Emil Pasca [:emilpasca]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:53.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/53.0

I have tested this issue on Windows 10 x32 and Windows 10 x64 with the latest Firefox release (53.0.2) and the latest Nightly (55.0a1-20170509132952) and haven't managed to reproduce it.
After navigating to the specified URL in the description and pressing CTRL-click on "Studienordnung Master Scientific Computing (...)", the pdf is successfully loaded in a new tab.

Can you please retest this using a new clean Firefox profile, maybe even safe mode, to eliminate custom settings as a possible cause (https://goo.gl/AR5o9d)?

Comment 2

[skierpage]

This just happened to me with Firefox Nightly . I had some PDFs that Firefox's built-in pdf.js viewer could not display well, so I changed Firefox Edit > Preferences > Files and Applications > Applications > PDF to, I think, "Save File." But then I wanted to go back to viewing in Firefox, so I changed that same preference to "Open in Firefox" (hmm, perhaps I should have chose "Preview in Nightly"). I clicked a PDF (can't remember if it was a link in the browser or a file in Firefox's Downloads window or a file in the OS file browser) and bam, Firefox endlessly opened new empty tab after tab. Because I had form data entered in another window, I couldn't kill Firefox, its (roughly) "Data you entered my be lost. Are you sure?" alert briefly appeared and then Firefox would redisplay on top. *Terrible* usability issue, I had to open a second Linux VT (Alt+Ctrl+F2) and kill firefox from the command line, and I lost all my work in that form.

I'll try to figure out the exact sequence to reproduce, meanwhile I hope this is enough to Confirm the bug. Endless tab opening while handling a file in Firefox has happened to me in the past, but not in the last about 2 years or so.

Comment 3

[skierpage]

(In reply to skierpage from comment #2)
> I'll try to figure out the exact sequence to reproduce
Endless New Tabs happen if I either click a link to a PDF on a web page, or open a PDF from my operating system which is configured to open them in Firefox Nightly (e.g. click a PDF in Dolphin or run `xdg-open path/to/file.pdf`). If I open a PDF from Firefox's Downloads window, it opens in the Okular application, which appears in Edit > Preferences > Files and Applications > Applications > PDF as "Open in Okular (default)" although as I wrote I have that set to "Use firefox".  Note sic, lowercase "firefox": I suspect I might have added /path/to/nightly/firefox to the set of applications at some point.

If I change Edit > Preferences > Files and Applications > Applications > PDF to "Preview in Nightly", then clicking a link to a PDF in a browser tab opens the PDF in Firefox, hooray. But if I open a PDF from my operating system, Firefox opens a new tab for file:///path/to/file.pdf but then it downloads the file; I don't know how to get back to using Firefox as my OS' PDF viewer.

Comment 4

[Loic]

It's because you associated .pdf to Firefox, so the browser calls itself recursively to open the PDF.

Comment 5

[Loic]

See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-repeatedly-opens-empty-tabs-or-windows

Comment 6

[azad.tasan]

Weirdly, setting PDF to "Preview in Firefox" in Options -> Applications fixed the issue for me (at least it has not occurred when it used to since I changed it). It was previously set to TWINUI (I'm on Win10) and the default program to open PDFs with in my Windows settings was (and is) MS Edge (the default) http://imgur.com/a/PfKKB Weird but alright. 

I'm sorry it took me so long to comment again by the way, I had lost my laptop and when I luckily got it back, I was quite busy for a while.