232209 - Popup Blocker blocks any clicks made by user on links with target="_blank" when page is still loading

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 101190

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[Richard Corbin]

User-Agent:       
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113

The popup blocker prevents any links with a target of "_blank" from being
clicked by the user whilst the page is still loading

The browser should allow a user to click and view any popup windows he/she wants
to see regardless of the fact that the page is still loading. It is the user --
not the page -- making the request to view that link's popup, and the user
should get what they want.

This is extremely annoying for me. If I visit a page where there are many
images/a lot of content, any link that has a target of "_blank" will not load
until the page itself has fully loaded (which may take some time considering the
large amount of images/content).

I am on a 512Kb/s connection and I dread to think what a 56k user's experience
of this situation would be!

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Load a 'content-rich' webpage (a page that will take a very long time to
complete on your connection) with links having target of "_blank".
2. Try clicking on one of the links with a target of "_blank" - notice that this
action is blocked by the popup blocker.
3. If necessary hard-refresh the page (Ctrl-F5 on Windows O/S) and go back to
Step 1 to try again.
Actual Results:  
After step 2, no popup window appears.

Expected Results:  
As the request to view the link was made by the end-user's mouse click, the
popup window should have been permitted.

Any other popups that the user does not want to see should be blocked.

After searching around to see if this bug had already been logged the closest I
came across was the following: Bug 101190.

I don't believe this bug I am logging now to be a duplicate of that bug because
the aforementioned bug relates to JavaScript window.open() whereas this bug
relates to links with a target of "_blank" being clicked while a page is still
loading, and those links not working.

----

A messy workaround for this bug is to unblock popups from the website you are
viewing (I guess, if you intend to view that website regularly). However,
although you can now click links with a target of "_blank" whilst the page is
loading, any advertising popups will now *also appear*, exactly what the popup
blocker should have been blocking!

Comment 1

[Frank Wein [:mcsmurf]]

it's a dupe

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 101190 ***

Comment 2

[Richard Corbin]

Why is this a dupe?

It's different to 101190 in that this bug is for user's clicks and 101190 was
for window.open().

This bug deals with something different, and therefore it isn't a dupe.

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

target="_blank" calls window.open() internally to open the new window.  See
nsDocShell::FindTarget



*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 101190 ***

Comment 4

[Dan M]

The summary of bug 101190 reads "window.open() in onclick, click anchor with new
window target, etc..." <a target="_blank"> is an anchor with a new window
target. To be precise, this is bug 227411, which is a duplicate of 101190. See
bug 227411 comment 11.