Closed Bug 1682984 Opened 5 years ago Closed 4 years ago

Links Will Not Open in Browser But Start Blogs and News Feed Account

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, defect)

Product:
Thunderbird
Component:
Message Reader UI
Platform:
x86_64
Linux
Type:
defect

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
VERIFIED INVALID

People

(Reporter: kitchm, Unassigned)

References

Details

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0

Steps to reproduce:

I have Debian 10 with Xfce 4.12. I open the client and get my mail. I see a link in a message and select it. I get a message that states "You already have a subscription for this feed", and a new folder/account opens entitled "Blogs & News Feeds" with a trashcan sub-folder.

I do not know what started this except to say that this happened after the latest upgrade.

Actual results:

See above.

Expected results:

The link should have opened in my default browser.

Severity: -- → S2
OS: Unspecified → Linux
Hardware: Unspecified → x86_64

This issue also affects Debian 10 GNOME and seems to be intermittent depending on the link.

I am using Bunsenlabs Lithium (i.e. Debian system) with Amd64 and have the same issue

This is not a bug in Thunderbird itself, but an error in a configuration file. I'm saying this because I had to set up a new user on my laptop, and Thunderbird links work perfectly. I'd be really grateful if anyone has made progress on this or can point to the file that is the probably cause of the problem...

In the past there was something similar happening if someone accidentally set Thunderbird as default browser. I would check the system settings.

(In reply to Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] from comment #5)

In the past there was something similar happening if someone accidentally set Thunderbird as default browser. I would check the system settings.

Thanks. In this case the browser is configured correctly

My default browser settings are correct. This issue appears for me on three different Debian 10 systems and I've had this issue using Tails (Debian) which starts with a clean home directory on every boot. I suspect that this is a bug in Debian because I've had KeePassX links open in Thunderbird a few times.

(In reply to Bob Nelson from comment #7)

My default browser settings are correct. This issue appears for me on three different Debian 10 systems and I've had this issue using Tails (Debian) which starts with a clean home directory on every boot. I suspect that this is a bug in Debian because I've had KeePassX links open in Thunderbird a few times.

I'm a fairly basic user, but I'm wondering why would my other login on the same machine work properly, if it is a bug rather than a configuration error? (and are these 2 separate things?)

(In reply to simbobo from comment #8)

(In reply to Bob Nelson from comment #7)

My default browser settings are correct. This issue appears for me on three different Debian 10 systems and I've had this issue using Tails (Debian) which starts with a clean home directory on every boot. I suspect that this is a bug in Debian because I've had KeePassX links open in Thunderbird a few times.

I'm a fairly basic user, but I'm wondering why would my other login on the same machine work properly, if it is a bug rather than a configuration error? (and are these 2 separate things?)

It’s possible that the bug is corrupting a file in the Thunderbird configuration directory and a clean directory temporarily resolves the problem.

There are two separate issues and they are likely caused by the same bug.

  1. Links in Thunderbird intermittently open as news feeds instead of launching the browser.
  2. Links in other applications intermittently open as news feeds in Thunderbird instead of launching the browser, even with the correct system settings.

Yes that makes sense

It would be great if this gets some attention because it's a real nuisance

Not having any issue with any Thunderbird version on Fedora 33 Workstation, Gnome desktop with Firefox Nightly and Thunderbird 78.9.0 set as my default applications in the systems Default Applications settings.

I have Firefox release from Fedora, Firefox Beta and Nightly installed with Nightly as my default browser. Thunderbird 78.8.1 from Fedora, 78.9.0, Beta and Daily with Thunderbird 78.9.0 my default email application.

Clicking a link in an email using any of the email apps opens in Nightly, or offers to launch Nightly from the profile manager.
Haven't encountered the problem clicking any link in feeds.

Link to do some testing with?

Debian issue?

(In reply to simbobo from comment #10)

Yes that makes sense

Does it? I read my comment again and I'm not sure why I said it the way I did. The corrupted configuration file would be in the home directory, not the Thunderbird configuration directory, and there's only one bug.

I haven't seen this bug since updating to Debian 10.9.

I have the bug in 10.9. "It’s possible that the bug is corrupting a file in the Thunderbird configuration directory and a clean directory temporarily resolves the problem." seems to be a feasible cause.

I experienced this bug for the first time this morning, after a system crash and reboot. I was using thunderbird 1:78.6.0-1deb10u1 at the time. I have since upgraded to 1:78.9.0-1deb10u1 and the problem persists.

I just ran into this problem again. I am using Debian 10, Xfce 4.12 and Thunderbird Version 78.11.0
Build ID 20210528153351
Distribution ID
User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/78.11.0
OS Linux 4.19.0-16-amd64

Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 4 years ago
Resolution: --- → INVALID

Why did you close this?

Flags: needinfo?(kitchm)

I'm reopening bug 1684847 since it was closed as a duplicate of this ticket which is now falsely closed as invalid.

Thanks Bob. I did not mean to close it. The options are sometimes confusing and do not fit the facts.

Thanks again.

Flags: needinfo?(kitchm)

So nobody wants to provide some links a bug triager could test with on another Linux and a Windows system?

Flags: needinfo?(kitchm)

Well, my mistake. I'm sorry I did not save the link, and now I can't find it. I'll report when it happens again.

Flags: needinfo?(kitchm)

(In reply to WaltS48 [:walts48] from comment #20)

So nobody wants to provide some links a bug triager could test with on another Linux and a Windows system?

I'm not sure how one would provide a link in this situation that would be useful in any way. But since you ask, my father sent me this link this evening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcym3Nq3hg8 Clicking on it gives the message "verifying the feed", followed by "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcym3Nq3hg8 could not be found. Please check the name and try again."

You could provide it in a response as you just did, and I could click it from the email I receive, which I did, and it opened in my default browser without a problem using Thunderbird 78.11.0 on Fedora 34 Workstation.

But it appears this bug is RESOLVED INVALID in favor of bug 1684847, or did Bob forget to REOPEN this one?

I think I understand. Bug 1682984 was the first bug report filed about this issue, so bug 1684848 filed a month later would be a dupe of this bug and was rightly resolved as such, but reopened by the reporter.

Status: RESOLVED → REOPENED
Component: Untriaged → Message Reader UI
Ever confirmed: true
Resolution: INVALID → ---

(In reply to WaltS48 [:walts48] from comment #24)

You could provide it in a response as you just did, and I could click it from the email I receive, which I did, and it opened in my default browser without a problem using Thunderbird 78.11.0 on Fedora 34 Workstation.

But it appears this bug is RESOLVED INVALID in favor of bug 1684847, or did Bob forget to REOPEN this one?

I think I understand. Bug 1682984 was the first bug report filed about this issue, so bug 1684848 filed a month later would be a dupe of this bug and was rightly resolved as such, but reopened by the reporter.

I would've reopened this report but I don't have the privileges so I reopened the dupe to attract attention to this wrongly closed report.

Just upgraded to version 78.12.0 (64-bit), and the problem came back with a vengeance.

It never went away for me :(

Dude, I'm sorry. I cannot even imagine what is causing it except a programming issue. That it exists constantly for some and intermitantly for others is baffling.

Linux Mint 20.1. TB 78.11.0

I experienced this bug a few months ago, and it returned yesterday.

When clicking on a website link in an email, instead of going straight to Pale Moon (my default browser), nothing happened. I then start getting messages warning me that Pale Moon is not my default browser, do I want it to be, and "Remind me every time" (I am not sure what generated this message and when, TB or Pale Moon).

I went into the Pale Moon prefs, agreed to it being my default browser, and removed the tick against "remind me every time". I previously then rebooted to ensure it all stayed as it should be, but this time I just closed the PM prefs and restarted TB. This solved the problem. Clicking on an email or NG link now opens that link in Pale Moon.

I have experienced this bug on Debian GNU/Linux 11 (upgraded from previous version).
In my case, it was due to a misconfiguration in /usr/share/xfce4/helpers/firefox.desktop which is used by the default application system on xfce4.
I was using firefox-esr, but the xfce4/helpers/firefox.desktop file was for plain firefox and that caused it to get confused - it couldn't find the icon and firefox itself didn't recognise that it was the default web application.

I found two workarounds for this:

  1. Create a fixed xfce4/helpers/firefox.desktop file
  2. Use debian-sensible-browser as the web browser (and configure that accordingly)

Hope this is useful to someone.

Thanks for the suggestion. I don't use xfce so I guess not relevant

I suspect some parts of the default application framework are common, so I would definitely check any user and system-wide firefox.desktop files and check that they're correct.

Depending on your distro, you may also have other options. For example, Debian provides desktop files for debian-sensible-browser which, depending on your setup, is a working front end for gnome-www-browser or x-www-browser (or similar) which can be configured to use firefox with the /etc/alternatives system.

Well, here's a new one that may be related. I went to fill out a survey. Instead of opening in the browser, it opened another tab in TB. The survey worked just fine, but was odd that such a thing happened. I have never experienced that before.

Please note that this did not create a Blogs and News Feeds section.

Definitely sounds like the system thinks Thunderbird is the default browser. Whichever configuration file on the system is wrong is hard to say.
On the Thunderbid side, maybe also check the network.protocol-handler.**** prefs

Thanks to people who pointed me to an apparent solution. I changed network.protocol-handler.app.http [and https] value x-www-browser to value /usr/bin/firefox and all is well now. But I guess this is still a bug as a user shouldn't have to work this out for themselves

Thanks, somehow the x-www-browser gets it wrong then. You should also be able to just clear that pref value.

(This is not something thunderbird ships, but comes with the linux distro.)

Status: REOPENED → RESOLVED
Closed: 4 years ago → 4 years ago
Resolution: --- → INVALID

but if I type x-www-browser at the command line it opens Firefox. It's all a mystery to me

This issue reappeared for me yesterday.

By manually checking the operation of sensible-browser (correct), xdg-open (correct), and gvfs-open (broken), and checking for file modification times in my home directory, I traced the root cause to ~/.config/mimeapps.list, which was modified (how?) to include the following:

...

[Default Applications]
x-scheme-handler/http=thunderbird.desktop
x-scheme-handler/https=thunderbird.desktop
x-scheme-handler/ftp=thunderbird.desktop
x-scheme-handler/chrome=thunderbird.desktop
text/html=thunderbird.desktop
application/x-extension-htm=thunderbird.desktop
application/x-extension-html=thunderbird.desktop
application/x-extension-shtml=thunderbird.desktop
application/xhtml+xml=thunderbird.desktop
application/x-extension-xhtml=thunderbird.desktop
application/x-extension-xht=thunderbird.desktop
x-scheme-handler/msteams=teams.desktop

This is obviously nonsense, which can be confirmed by comparison with the same file on a similar machine. If I s/thunderbird/firefox-esr/ on these entries, links open in firefox-esr once again.

So the issue (for me at least) is that thunderbird gets added as an html handler to the per-user mailcap override (by what? itself?). I did upgrade firefox-esr (but not thunderbird) yesterday, but the mimeapps file was modified 30 minutes before the upgrade (according to /var/log/dpkg.log), so this may not be related. I may have restarted thunderbird and/or firefox before doing the upgrade, but I can't remember for sure.

This happened to me again just a week or so ago, but sadly I lost the email message link.

I can confirm that my ~/.config/mimeapps.list shows that thunderbird has been added to the above lines along with firefox, and that firefox is second in the line.

This bug needs to be changed to Verified and Open.

Version: 78 → Thunderbird 91

The problem started in version 78 (or before?), so the version should stay at 78.

Version: Thunderbird 91 → 78

If you say so.

Thunderbird neither ships such a file nor modify it. If something is wrong, I think it's a bug in whatever distros do.

(In reply to Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] from comment #45)

Thunderbird neither ships such a file nor modify it. If something is wrong, I think it's a bug in whatever distros do.

So it would be useful to know which distros it affects, and reading through the whole thread it appears that it's a Debian problem, with Debian 10 and 11, Linux Mint and Bunsenlabs all being in the frame, while Fedora is apparently not guilty.

Well it just happened again. Just had upgraded to TB 91.5.0 (64-bit). Got an email from an insurance company asking to go to their web site by way of a link in the mail. The link is https://click.email-libertymutual.com/?qs=7803f1c6012517c4..............

If I right-click on the link and choose to open in browser, it still creates a blog account and nothing happens.

I can find nothing in the settings to stop or block this behavior.

Yes, Debian Bullseye (11).

Why did you need to right-click?

When I left-click in the bug mail, it opens this page for me in my browser.

Redirect error

Does the same if I right-click and select "Open Link in Browser".

Can't find anything in your Thunderbird settings, browser settings or Debian settings.

My Thunderbird is set as the default email application in Thunderbird settings and Fedora settings.
My Firefox is set as the default browser application in Firefox settings and Fedora settings.

Since a link does not open in the browser when I normally select the link, I choose to try and bypass the behavior by selecting to open in browser from the context menu.

I encountered this on Ubuntu 22.04 having installed the Firefox build and adding the desktop file.

It seems Thunderbird was unaware of Firefox until I removed the desktop file and installed Firefox from a deb instead.

Now Thunderbird properly opens hyperlinks again. Thanks TimF and Magnus for pointing me in the right direction.

I had this problem recently on linux with xfce. It was the xfce setting that needed fixing. (see above comment)

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