1828500 - External links that open a new Firefox browser load the most recently viewed pages but not the page for the link

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1818194

(Core :: Widget: Cocoa, defect)

Description

[Kellogg Booth]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/112.0

Steps to reproduce:

When Firefox is not running, I click an external link (such as in an email message). Firefox is set as my default browser (Mac OS 12.6.5). I expect this to open a Firefox window and load the page associated with the link.

Actual results:

Firefox open a window and reloads all of the tabs that were open when Firefox was last running. The page associated with the link I clicked is not opened in any of the tabs and no new tab or window is opened other than the one with the old pages.

Expected results:

As noted above, I expected that a new Firefox window would open with only one tab and that tab would have loaded the page associated with the link I clicked.

If I re-click the link, everything works as I would expect -- a new tab opens in the window and the page associated with the link is loaded into the tab. I do not feel that this behavior is sensible. It requires clicking twice (obviously not anyone's intention); it works differently depending on whether Firefox was running already or not; it raises privacy issues.

one privacy issue is as follows: Suppose a user is viewing pages that for whatever reason the user does not want others to know the user is viewing. To facilitate this, the user closes the browser before giving a presentation to an audience that the user does not want to see the pages in question. The user clicks on a link to a page that the user would like the audience to see. Instead of seeing that page, the audience sees one of the pages that the user tried to hide.

A variant of this is that the user might be running on a local network that is not fully trusted and for this reason the user does not want to communicate with the servers associated with the previously viewed pages (but the user is OK letting the network see communication with other pages). Auto-loading the old pages would reveal the server addresses to the local network even if content is fully encrypted.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Core::Widget: Cocoa' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.