1730986 - Describe the behavior of hyperlinks before following them

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[avghelper.ga7u4]

Attachment: Behavior of Safari for links that open a new tab

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:92.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/92.0

Steps to reproduce:

Hover over any hyperlink which is configured to open a new tab or window (using target="__blank" or the like.

Actual results:

Firefox displays a tooltip in the lower left or right corner of the window which contains the destination (href) of the associated anchor tag, and no further information.

Expected results:

I would like for Firefox to show whether the link will open in a new window, a new tab, or scroll to a tag on the same page, as Safari does. Attached is an example of this behavior in Safari, while browsing on https://codetribute.mozilla.org/projects/ff.

A link which will open a new foreground tab when clicked, whether by default or due to a currently-depressed key combination, would present a tooltip which says something like: Open "https://example.com" in a new tab

A link which will open a new tab in the background, whether by default or due to a currently-depressed key combination, would present a tooltip which says something like: Open "https://example.com" in a new tab behind the current one

A link which will scroll the page to an element on the page (such as an #identified element) would say something like: Scroll to #footer on this page

Similar messages for behavior variants would appear for each case.

I don't know whether this behavior is patented by Apple, since Safari is so far the only browser I've seen exhibit this behavior.

Comment 1

[avghelper.ga7u4]

Attachment: Behavior of Safari for links to identified elements on the same page

Comment 2

[Clara Guerrero ( Need Info Brindusa Tot Please)]

Hi,

Thank you for opening this enhancement. I will set this as New and set a component for this in order to get the dev team involved.

Thanks for your input.
Best,
Clara

Comment 3

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez [:emilio]]

Makes sense, though this is more of a UI feature than a Core bug. Marco, do you happen know what's the right component for this? If you can point me to the code that takes care of this I can also give a shot at fixing it but no promises :)

Comment 4

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

I think the relevant code lives here https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/4d90ff4537330d6b17cb956c0fadf759086d9bb7/browser/base/content/browser.js#5691-5767, maybe Tabbed Browser could be a better component.
Fwiw, I suspect there may be old bugs requesting the same thing, and it may not be so trivial as it appears because we also have preferences changing the default behavior of clicking links, thus making the matrix of possible values a bit more complex.
There may be reasons why this was not done yet, but I don't know them, I think the triage owners of Tabbed Browser may know.