1711592 - Firefox Keeps Asking to Choose an application although "always use default is selected" on external links

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1717314

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[mrpaint97]

Attachment: qS7jmi1.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:88.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/88.0

Steps to reproduce:

Open an external link that requires another application to function properly

Actual results:

Link opens up a pop up that asks for what application to use and if I want to use that application as default for these links and said link works when opened inside of firefox or is pasted into the URL

Expected results:

Firefox should've remembered from previous times that I had set the links have a default application already and not ask me with a popup.

Comment 1

[Negritas Sergiu, Desktop QA]

Attachment: bug1711592.png

Hello! I have tried to reproduce this issue using firefox 90.0a1 (2021-05-21), and 89.0b15 on Windows 10 and also on Ubuntu 20.04 unfortunately I don't know if this is the issue you encountered.

I have attached a screenshot on what appears after choosing the default app for zoom meetings. Is this the issue you are encountering?

Comment 2

[mrpaint97]

(In reply to Negritas Sergiu from comment #1)

Created attachment 9222965 [details]
bug1711592.png

Hello! I have tried to reproduce this issue using firefox 90.0a1 (2021-05-21), and 89.0b15 on Windows 10 and also on Ubuntu 20.04 unfortunately I don't know if this is the issue you encountered.

I have attached a screenshot on what appears after choosing the default app for zoom meetings. Is this the issue you are encountering?

Yes it's basically this but it only happens when opening an external link from another software and it doesn't save the option when you choose "Always allow"

I've tested this on waterfox and it didn't have this issue, only firefox has this issue
I went through some basic troubleshooting discussion on https://reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/ne3tvk/firefox_keeps_asking_to_choose_an_application/

Comment 3

[Negritas Sergiu, Desktop QA]

Hello! Sorry for the late reply!

There is work in developing a more simpler way to process external link from Firefox. I will proceed to mark this issue as new since there is ongoing work in this area.

Comment 4

[Chris Heath]

This has been happening to me for a couple months. At work we use a custom app handler protocol ah:// that opens custom links with custom applications. It used to work and I assume that a recent update introduced the bug. Other custom protocols like zoom do remember the preference. I have checked the handlers.json file and the settings and they appear to be set properly but the choice is still presented. Just recently a co-worker mentioned that it is happening with one of our vendor software (PaperVision by DigiTech). They use the lauchpvwa:// protocol to launch their application.

Comment 5

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Apologies that this took so long to get triaged; I'm not really sure why that happened...

In Firefox 88 we stopped honouring the "always do this" checkbox when Firefox gets invoked with non-http/https links because it could lead to infinite loops (Firefox hands the link to some other app, then the app hands it back to Firefox, and so on and so forth - leading to infinite tabs). We inadvertently also broke the case where external applications pass Firefox http/https links that then redirect to non-http/https ones. bug 1717314 fixed this in Firefox 92, this report appears to be from 88 - but based on the reddit thread, about the same external app (discord), so I'm going to assume that the fix in 92 should have dealt with this. If not, please comment here and we can reopen this ticket and investigate further.

Comment 6

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Chris Heath from comment #4)

This has been happening to me for a couple months. At work we use a custom app handler protocol ah:// that opens custom links with custom applications. It used to work and I assume that a recent update introduced the bug. Other custom protocols like zoom do remember the preference. I have checked the handlers.json file and the settings and they appear to be set properly but the choice is still presented. Just recently a co-worker mentioned that it is happening with one of our vendor software (PaperVision by DigiTech). They use the lauchpvwa:// protocol to launch their application.

This appears to be a separate issue; please file a separate bug with more details about the exact sequence of links that is opened - you mention several protocols, and it's not clear what version of Firefox you're seeing this with or which link is causing the problem.

Comment 7

[Chris Heath]

Firefox 92.0 (32-bit)
submitted bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1732132