1963328 - Improve handling of externally opened links

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Simon Friedberger (:simonf)]

We have several open bugs which are asking for better handling of externally (usually) opened links.

Bug 1601351 wants to open them in the currently running profile, not the default profile
Bug 1959769 wants to select which profile to use
Bug 1838835 wants to use the Firefox on the current workspace (OS dependent)

Tab groups, profiles and container tabs have large overlap in use-cases and are probably all affected.
According to mossop we have heuristics for container tabs.
VPN might also lead to people wanting to open external links in a certain way.
Bug 1646985 wants to be queried for which container to use when pressing Ctrl-t which is also related.

We should have a central location to handle this logic and maybe we should consider having an extension API so it can be customized. Shane, is there a standard for such an API or does another browser have one?

Comment 1

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

This bug is extremely non-specific. What does "FIXED" mean here?

As you say there are lots of different ideas for how we could improve external link handling, it's something that the profiles team has been thinking about but deferred for initial rollout but there are tab groups and containers also in the mix. This really needs someone, likely a product manager to decide what we should offer before we consider what we should implement.

Put another way I think this needs to be discussed elsewhere first.

Comment 2

[Simon Friedberger (:simonf)]

"Has been discussed elsewhere here is the result: ..." would be a reasonable FIXED condition to me. Feel free to migrate this if it makes more sense on a different tracker.

Comment 3

[Luca Greco [:rpl] [:luca] [:lgreco]]

Routing needinfo from Shane to myself, to followup with adding this bug to add-ons office hours.