1611845 - Firefox - External URIs: Restore User-Friendly Application Names displayed from within the Launch Application Dialog

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: File Handling, defect)

Description

[elliottabarnes]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:72.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/72.0

Steps to reproduce:

I've only just observed this whilst running Firefox 72.0.2 - it's possible that this regression was introduced in a previous release, but up until this point I hadn't encountered the below for several weeks. To reproduce:

1. From a web page, open a URI that has been associated with an external application (a "mailto:" link is just one example, but any URI should do)

2. As expected, the "Launch Application" dialog will be triggered when the link is activated that allows the user to select which application to use to open the URI

The important bit to observe here is the default entry listed under the "Send to" section of the dialog. In previous Firefox releases, the first application in the list would be the application associated with the URI in question - however, a "friendly" name would be displayed in Firefox - my assumption is that this would either be based on the filename of the target application, or the data contained within the "Description" field of its executable. As of Firefox 72, however, the string displayed by Firefox now displays the full path to the filename - something like the following:

C:\Program Files (X86)\Application Name\Application Name.exe

To restore a user-friendly experience, could we consider restoring the previous behaviour - so that Firefox displays a meaningful application name to users? It's also worth noting that I'm using the NVDA screen reader - so it may in fact be that Firefox is in fact displaying a user-friendly application name, but something has changed in the dialog in terms of how the application name is presented.

Actual results:

N/A

Expected results:

N/A

Comment 1

[Rares Doghi, Desktop QA]

Hi, I tried to reproduce this issue on my end but without success, When I click one of the Mailto links in a page it just automatically opens the default program set for it, if this issue was recently changed can you please try to do a mozregression for it in order to find the defect that may have caused this issue ?

If you're willing, we have a tool called mozregression that will automate the process of downloading various builds from during the development cycle to narrow down the change that's causing problems. Information on the tool is available at

http://mozilla.github.io/mozregression/. A command like |mozregression mozregression --good 2019-05-05 --bad 2020-01-31| should be enough to get started. in case the --good build is still bad you can just change to an older date. This will help us get to the bottom of it.

In the Mean time can you please try our latest Nightly build ? you can find it here: https://nightly.mozilla.org/
Just to make sure the issue still occurs there as well.

Comment 2

[elliottabarnes]

Apologies - this will only work if the protocol is set to "Always Ask" from within the Firefox Options dialog. If you activate a protocol URI from within a web page that is set to "Always Ask", the above behaviour can be observed.

Comment 3

[Emma Humphries ☕️🎸🧞‍♀️✨ (she/they) [:emceeaich] (Pacific Time) use needinfo]

Attachment: Screenshot from 2020-02-07 14-52-12.png

Hi, I'm on my Ubuntu desktop and didn't bring a windows machine so I can't verify what you're seeing, but is your expectation something like the above if you clicked on a text file?

But instead of the app name you see a path to the app?

Comment 4

[Emma Humphries ☕️🎸🧞‍♀️✨ (she/they) [:emceeaich] (Pacific Time) use needinfo]

Attachment: Screenshot from 2020-02-07 14-53-00.png

And similarly if you had set a web site as the handler you expected to see something similar to this, but you're not seeing the URLs?

Comment 5

[Rares Doghi, Desktop QA]

After setting up the Always Ask option from Firefox (thank you) I reach this website: https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_link_mailto and clicked the Send Mail button which triggered the Launch application prompt.
I only have Thunderbird installed which did not show any path and NVDA read it as Thunderbird not the path to the installation folder, and I also had the gmail and yahoo options that also had the urls underneath. I can't reproduce the this issue on my end.
Can you please try the mozregression tool mentioned in Comment 1 ? it will help us get to the bottom of this issue.

Comment 6

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

Bugbug thinks this bug should belong to this component, but please revert this change in case of error.

Comment 7

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Right now we don't have enough details to do anything here. If we work out what has changed / how to reproduce what is broken, we can reopen and come up with a fix.