1622780 - Thunderbird 68+ doesn't support opening external URL in browsers, instead supports opening URL in a tab in Thunderbird itself

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1664708

(Thunderbird :: Add-Ons: Extensions API, enhancement)

Description

[bprasannakumar]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0

Steps to reproduce:

Open a link constructed through WebExtensions API using browser.tabs.create.

Actual results:

In Thunderbird 68+ versions, the Web Extensions API doesn't support opening links in external browsers. Using browser.tabs.create opens a link only as a new tab as part of Thunderbird itself.

Expected results:

In Thunderbird <=60 versions, we had messenger.launchExternalURL to open a link from Thunderbird into a browser (like Firefox, Chrome, etc.,). Like this if we could have an WebExtensions API interface to open external link in external browser instead of in-built browser of Thunderbird it would be very helpful.

A question on the same has been raised in StackOverflow: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59432941/how-to-open-urls-using-addon-for-thunderbird-68-in-external-browsers-instead-of. But, till now there is no help on this question. So, raising my requirement as enhancement request to see if there is any quick way to open link in external browser instead of built-in browser of Thunderbird.

Comment 1

[Geoff Lankow (:darktrojan)]

I highly recommend using the experiment generator to create a one-function experiment API that wraps your existing code.

Comment 2

[bprasannakumar]

Attachment: search_context_menu.js

Adding the javascript which is used at my end which opens the URL from Thunderbird.

Comment 3

[bprasannakumar]

Thank you for sharing experiment generator application. It may require some time for me to understand how it works. In the meanwhile im sharing the JavaScript of the Add-On i have developed for your perusal. Please check the attached file.

Comment 4

[klaus]

see also a workaround describes here: https://thunderbird.topicbox.com/groups/addons/Tfb76bff3d15a2a97/launch-external-url