1695529 - Welcome to Daily (mail start page) opens in OS browser - should open in a mail tab?

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

I've seen Welcome to Daily (mail start page) open in Firefox browser upon first restart after update several times - I believe it should open in a new mail tab as it used to?
Makes for a pretty confusing and wiggly out-of-the-box experience.
It is also shown in msg preview pane of 3-pane.
Seen on 88.0a1 (2021-02-28) (64-bit) on Win10.

Comment 2

[Matt]

Fundamentally, all links to thunderbird.net are supposed to open in the client not the browser is my understanding. Perhaps Magnus can get a policy set up so these sorts of bug are not what individuals would like to see, despite us both agreeing this is not correct behaviour and not what occurs in release channels

Comment 4

[Takanori MATSUURA]

This is still reproduce at least after bumping version in Daily.

tracking-thunderbird_esr102?

Comment 5

[Takanori MATSUURA]

This occurs not only from the installer, but also from self-updates.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Takanori MATSUURA from comment #4)

This is still reproduce at least after bumping version in Daily.

tracking-thunderbird_esr102?

Thomas, can you check 102 RC1 and set tracking if it is an issue. (in my experience it is not)

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Calum, does this happen for you on daily?

Comment 8

[Danny Colin [:sdk]]

It happened to me pretty recently (~ a week) in Daily

Comment 9

[Calum Mackay]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #7)

Calum, does this happen for you on daily?

I'm not sure, I'm afraid. I don't see them with every new build (i.e. nightly), only when there is a change to the numbered release. I tend to dismiss them without looking closely, so I'm not sure whether I would remember where it appeared, sorry.

I'll certainly notice next time, and report here, although it may then be moot.

Comment 10

[Calum Mackay]

Yup, it's just happened to me too, with today's Daily. The following URL appeared in my Chome browser, and not in TB.

https://start.thunderbird.net/en-US/daily/?uri=/thunderbird/whatsnew/&locale=en-GB&version=104.0a1&channel=nightly&os=Darwin&buildid=20220629075609&oldversion=103.0a1

Comment 11

[Matt]

I got it in Firefox and in Daily yesterday.

User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:104.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/104.0a1
OS Windows_NT 10.0 19044
Application Binary C:\Program Files\Thunderbird Daily\thunderbird.exe

Comment 12

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Have just seen this happening on Beta (103 to 104, manual update via About). https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/104.0beta/releasenotes/?uri=/thunderbird/whatsnew/&locale=en-US&version=104.0&channel=beta&oldversion=103.0

Comment 13

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Also confirmed for Daily https://start.thunderbird.net/en-US/daily/?uri=/thunderbird/whatsnew/&locale=en-US&version=105.0a1&channel=nightly&os=WINNT&buildid=20220727102511&oldversion=104.0a1

Comment 14

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

I've just seen that things have become a bit fuzzy here, as sometimes we're talking about release notes and sometimes it's the start page (although confusingly both seem to have whatsnew in the URL).

Another data point is bug 1694688, based on bug 1563411 comment 24 and bug 1563411 comment 25 where Magnus says this behaviour is intentional for easier access in browser.

Comment 15

[Rob Lemley [:rjl]]

This is a Daily-only issue, and is really annoying.

What's happening is, specialTabs.openSpecialTabsOnStartup() is called by the 3Pane on startup (msgMail3PaneWindow.js:564) 1
It in turn calls showWhatsNewPage() 2.

showWhatsNewPage() works as expected for beta and release where the pref mailnews.start_page.override_url is an empty string value. However, for Daily, that pref is set to https://live.thunderbird.net/%APP%/whatsnew?locale=%LOCALE%&version=%VERSION%&channel=%CHANNEL%&os=%OS%&buildid=%APPBUILDID%&oldversion=%OLD_VERSION%. The values are filled in at runtime, and the URL is opened in a browser window which is the expected behavior.

What's unexpected, is that URL goes through a couple of redirects and winds up at the "Welcome to Daily" start page.

AIUI, the ideal situation here would be to redirect to some kind of page with information about Daily builds and maybe some kind of "this is what's being worked on". Since we don't have such a page, I will submit a patch to set mailnews.start_page.override_url to an empty string like it is for beta and release so this doesn't keep happening. We can always put it back or set a new URL whenever a better destination page is up on the website.

A couple of other details, the start-page-in-a-browser only opens when Daily is updated to a new major version (eg. 108.0a1 -> 109.0a1). Also, "Welcome to Daily" is still displayed in the 3pane. Changing this pref should not affect that.

Comment 16

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

We could potentially use https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/pushloghtml

Comment 17

[Rob Lemley [:rjl]]

Attachment: Bug 1695529 - Disable start_page.override_url on Daily. r=#thunderbird-reviewers

"override_url" is a bad name for this pref. It's opened in addition to the regular
start page, but in a browser window. The URL it's set to just ends up back at the
same start page after redirects and is sort of confusing.

Comment 18

[Rob Lemley [:rjl]]

At one point, the override_url pref was used to display release notes or something similar, that's now handled in the XML sent by AUS.

Given that code to open mailnews.start_page.url found in mailWindow.js and about3Page.js do not even attempt to use the override_url, we could remove the pref completely. I believe it's outlived its usefulness.

Comment 19

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/83dd4ba99625
Disable start_page.override_url on Daily. r=mkmelin