1891204 - New browser window is not opened from system notification if only private window or browser console are opened

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Alerts Service, defect, P1)

Description

[Bogdan Maris, Desktop Test Engineering]

Attachment: Gif showing the issue

Found in

• Latest Nightly 126.0a1

Affected versions

• Latest Nightly 126.0a1

Tested platforms

• Affected platforms: Windows 10 and Windows 11
• Unaffected platforms: macOS 13 and Ubuntu 22.04

Preconditions

• Have the default browser something that's not Nightly
• Have Nightly opened

Steps to reproduce

1. Open a private window and close the other normal windows
2. Visit about:preferences and click on Make Default...
3. Click on Show me from the system notification
   or
4. Open one normal window and Browser Console
5. Visit about:preferences and click on Make Default...
6. Quickly close the normal window before the notification appears
7. Click on Show me from the system notification

Expected result

• The expected sumo page opens in a normal window or in private window.

Actual result

• The sumo page is not loaded.

Regression range

• Not a regression since the notification landed just yesterday in Nightly (2024-04-12).

Additional notes

• I suspect this is not related with the notification itself but with how Firefox handles browser windows but I can't think of another way to reproduce at this time so feel free to change the component if necessary.
• Marking all the other Fx versions as unaffected but that can change if this is not related to the notification itself and someone has another way of reproducing it outside of the notification.
• If setting Nightly as Never remember history from about:preferences#privacy a new tab will open with the SUMO page.
• I tried a similar way of forcing a Fx window to open by using the mailto feature and a new window has opened correctly. Steps:

1. Set Nightly as the default Email handler in Settings from Windows
2. Open a 3rd party app with a mailto link (I used qBittorrent and went to About and there is a mailto url, any app that has something like that will do)
3. Have only the browser console opened and other Nightly browser windows closed
4. Click the mailto URL
   Actual result: A Nightly window is opened, loading the email service or the choose application flow.

Comment 1

[Nick Rishel [:nrishel]]

This might be a broader OMC issue and outside of the scope of Bug 1890066.

Comment 2

[Nick Rishel [:nrishel]]

Moving this to the Messaging System on the intuition that it looks like some weird interaction between it and private browsing, but we can reevaluate if OMC feels differently.

Comment 3

[Punam Dahiya [:pdahiya]]

(In reply to Nick Rishel [:nrishel] from comment #2)

Moving this to the Messaging System on the intuition that it looks like some weird interaction between it and private browsing, but we can reevaluate if OMC feels differently.

@nrishel on debugging code here seems to be not working as expected when private browsing is the only window that is open.

For regular window, winForAction is getting set correct and able to pass needed params to SpecialMessageActions API to handle OPEN_URL.

Changing component to Alert Service to help debug for this edge case handleWindowsTag implemented with Bug 1805514. Thanks

Comment 4

[Nick Rishel [:nrishel]]

Hmm, we intentionally filter against private browsing Windows unless private browsing is always enabled. The browser console case is probably that we don't have a window to launch into, but we're also not in a first launch scenario.

A couple fixes that might apply here:

1. Open a new window when there are no candidate windows for the notification to launch to.
2. Try to find a common identifier for windows that correlate between sessions and relaunch to them (opening a new window when there is no correlation)

Which direction is preferable depends on what we should be doing from a Messaging System notification that originates from a private window - we probably don't want to leak a private browser interaction into a normal session since there are implications around telemetry consent? I'll poke around to see what the correct behavior is here.