180708 - [RFE] Allow external HTTP protocol handler

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 108455

(MailNews Core :: Networking, enhancement)

Description

[Paul Prescod]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20021104 Chimera/0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.2b) Gecko/20021016

Mozilla overall is not properly factored to allow MailNews to use external
protocol handlers for HTTP. This is necessary for people who want to use
MailNews for mail and Phoenix, Chimera, Gaelon, Opera, lynx, IE, ... for browsing. 

First, there is no UI-exposed preference. A little educated guessing will get
you to 

user_pref("network.protocol-handler.external.http", true);

But it has a variety of bugs. That's probably why it has no UI.

First, there is the one documented here:

http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/Mozilla/126/0/9847563/

"Mozilla Mail suddenly wants to open the mail start page in your web browser
instead!

For each time you click on a newsgroup name or mail account, the mail 
start page will pop up in Phoenix. :("

That's really annoying. 

Second, if I ask Mozilla to open a Navigator window (from the Window menu), it
opens a window in my other browser. Saying that I want to use Chimera for HTTP
links in my mail program is not the same as saying I want to totally disable
Navigator and make it impossible to use. If I specifically ask for Navigator
from within Mozilla, I should get Navigator, not the other browser.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Edit prefs.js to add the line 

user_pref("network.protocol-handler.external.http", true);

2. Launch Mozilla Mail/News
3. Observe what happens when the start page launches
4. Try to open a new Navigator window from the window menu

Actual Results:  
Mozilla launches the external application wrongly for both step 3 and step 4.

Expected Results:  
Mozilla should have used the internal HTML renderer for step 3 and the
integrated navigator for step 4.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 108455 ***