173110 - Open in new tab/window for externally handled URL's leaves you with a blank tab/window

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 102380

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[Paul Waterman]

If you select "Open Link in New Window," or "Open Link in New Tab" (or
middle-click with your options set to do those) on a URL that will be externally
handled (e.g., a file which will be saved or handled by a helper app), you will
end up with a basically useless blank window or tab respectively, which you have
to manually close to get rid of.

It would be nice if Mozilla would detect that it won't actually be rendering
anything for these URLs and decline to actually open the new window or tab,
instead simply dropping into the helper / download manager / whatever else the
user has defined.

Note that this is a superset of bug 111909, which describes this behaviour
specifically with regard to mailto: URLs and tabbed browsing.

Comment 1

[Chris Lyon]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 102380 ***