1762328 - A link containing "about:[parameter]" does not open

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Toolkit :: Add-ons Manager, defect)

Description

[vt4842]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:98.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/98.0

Steps to reproduce:

An HTM file with the following code will open the website correctly in Firefox 98.0.2, as expected:
<a href="http://google.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">Google</a>

The same HTM file with the following code will NOT open the link:
<a href="about:addons" rel="noopener noreferrer">Firefox Add-ons</a>

Actual results:

Did not respond to clicking the link .
BTW opening this same HTM file in IE or Chrome and clicking the "about:" link DOES open the link (although obviously gives errors, as these 2 browsers don't recognize the "about:" format in a link)

Expected results:

Should have opened a browser tab leading to "about:[parameter]" (where [parameter] = addons / memory / etc)

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Toolkit::Add-ons Manager' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Alex Cornestean]

Hello,

I reproduced the issue on the latest Nightly (100.0a1/20220403215202), Beta (99.0/20220330194208) and Release (98.0.2/20220322144853) under Windows 10 x64 and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

Using the provided code snippets I created 2 HTM files and opened them in the browser. The one with “http://google.com” will properly open the website upon clicking the link, while the one with “about:addons” will fail to open the page - clicking the link does nothing except throw an error in the console (see screenshot for more details).

Comment 3

[Alex Cornestean]

Attachment: 2022-04-04_11h58_13.png

Comment 4

[:Gijs (he/him)]

This is expected, you can't link to about:addons or other privileged Firefox pages from unprivileged pages - doing so would be a security risk.

To open them manually, you can right click, copy the URL, and then paste.

Comment 5

[vt4842]

(In reply to :Gijs (he/him) from comment #4)

This is expected, you can't link to about:addons or other privileged Firefox pages from unprivileged pages - doing so would be a security risk.
Ah, fair enough.

What I was trying to achieve was a "hotlink" from my FF homepage which would launch about:memory. It just dawned on me though that I could simply add a bookmark tab to about:memory (doh!)