253960 - "Send link" does nothing on Linux for non-GNOME users

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Jeremy M. Dolan]

"Send link" under the file menu, and on the page context menu, does nothing
observable on Linux, though CPU use does hit 100% for a second or two when
selecting this action.

I don't really expect Firefox to have mail integration working properly on UNIX
for 1.0, but it would be nice to at least not expose the menu items.

Comment 1

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

->bryner for the nonce. I also see this.

not a problem on Mac or Windows.

Comment 2

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Do mailto: links work as well?

Comment 3

[Jeremy M. Dolan]

Interesting, clicking a mailto now does nothing as well. Before, you at least
got a message about mailto not being registered as a protocol.

In about:config
network.protocol-handler.expose.mailto  is false
network.protocol-handler.external.mailto  is true (though that must be the
default, I've not set it)

Is the expose.mailto pref supposed to block this UI from showing?

Comment 4

[Brian Ryner (not reading)]

This will launch whatever mail client you have configured to handle the mailto:
protocol in GNOME.  It launches thunderbird for me since I set it as the default
email program when it prompted on startup.

Comment 5

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

this is working for me now --except that if tbird is already running, tbird
crashes when I click a mailto: link or select File > Send Link: see bug 261961
for that issue. how is this working for other people?

Comment 6

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

marking w4m (current nightly and ffox-pr) --but reopen if this still occurs with
a recent build.

Comment 7

[Jeremy M. Dolan]

"Send Link" in PR causes quite a bit of HD churn and CPU use, and then does nothing.

> This will launch whatever mail client you have configured to handle the
> mailto: protocol in GNOME. 

I don't use GNOME, so now what?

Expected behavior would be either:
  a) Don't show the two menu items when there is no mail client hooked up (this
     is my preference. If I wanted my web browser to have e-mail UI, I'd be
     using Seamonkey)
  b) When clicking "send link" when no mail interface is avilable, open a web
     page or alert dialog which explains to user the problem and how to fix it.
  c) Provide UI in the prefernces (like we provide for "default browser") to
     configure what happens when "send link" is clicked. (GAIM, which I believe
     is the de facto standard GNOME IM client, provides a way to manually
     configure which browser is used for link clicking. This is no different).

Comment 8

[chris hofmann]

doesn't look like there is going to be enough time to get patches in place to do
the things recommended above.  the push for 1.0 has been to get as much gnome
integration as possbile.  this will need to come after 1.0 unless someone has
time to work on it

Comment 9

[Lajos Kósa]

(In reply to comment #4)
> This will launch whatever mail client you have configured to handle the mailto:
> protocol in GNOME.  It launches thunderbird for me since I set it as the default
> email program when it prompted on startup.
Yes, that's true. But another bug is, when thunderbird is already running, it
will start it again! Firefox should check if thunderbird is running, an only
start it again, when not; otherwise it should only open a new message window -
as mozilla does. It happens only under linux.

Comment 10

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

*** Bug 265009 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 11

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

not a blocker for 1.1, non-GNOME users may need to do additional configuration
to make mail links work.  Providing GAIM-style UI isn't something I want to do,
since by default on GNOME we "just work" using system defaults.

Comment 12

[joel]

(In reply to comment #9)

>This will launch whatever mail client you have configured to handle the mailto:
> protocol in GNOME.  

What is this "GNOME" and why should Aunt Mildred care? Like an awful lot of
people, she uses KDE. Why are you building a gnome-only browser? Why would any
sane coder write window-manager specific dependencies into a browser? (and
supposedly a cross platform browser?). 

If you want to take the easy way out and not provide mail client config options,
why not do somoething slightly sane and look for an environment variable, like
all other unix programs, rather than a likely non-existent gnome setting?

NB firefox is still unusable, as the inability to handle a simple "mailto" link
is a pretty fundamental flaw.

Comment 13

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Still an issue with the latest beta 3 of Firefox 3.1?

Comment 14

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Henrik, no response from PM to joel. And I think reporter is gone.

Comment 15

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

WFM with a recent Firefox 3.5 pre build on Ubuntu 8.10. If anyone still has this problem, feel free to reopen with clear STR. Thanks.