271914 - -remote openFILE() does not honour opening pages in a new tab

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 280636

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[Dirk Jagdmann]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

If you invoke new pages with the -remote feature from the command line on Linux,
Firefox 1.0 does not honour the user settings from the "Preferences" Dialog when
"new-tab" is choosen and the webpage is loaded from harddisk via openFile().

In Contrast openURL() is working correctly.


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Choose Preferences -> Advanced -> Tabbed Browsing -> a new tab in the most
recent window
2. from the command line issue this command 'firefox -remote
"openURL(http://yahoo.com)"'. yahoo will load in a new tab
3. issue this: 'firefox -remote "openURL(http://google.com)"' and google will
load in a new tab. Thus the new-tab setting works with the openURL() command
4. issue: 'firefox -remote "openFILE(/etc/passwd)"'. The google page (if it was
still active) is now used to display your passwords, but they should show up in
a new tab leaving the google tab intact.

Actual Results:  
The last tab is loaded with the contents of the file.

Expected Results:  
The file contents should be shown in a new tab.

Comment 1

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Take a look at the bugs at:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=&short_desc_type=allwordssubstr&short_desc=new+tab+remote&product=Firefox&long_desc_type=substring&long_desc=&bug_file_loc_type=allwordssubstr&bug_file_loc=&status_whiteboard_type=allwordssubstr&status_whiteboard=&keywords_type=allwords&keywords=&emailassigned_to1=1&emailtype1=exact&email1=&emailassigned_to2=1&emailreporter2=1&emailqa_contact2=1&emailtype2=exact&email2=&bugidtype=include&bug_id=&votes=&chfieldfrom=&chfieldto=Now&chfieldvalue=&cmdtype=doit&order=Reuse+same+sort+as+last+time&field0-0-0=noop&type0-0-0=noop&value0-0-0=
and see if this one is a duplicate of any of those.

Comment 2

[Dirk Jagdmann]

(In reply to comment #1)

No, those are all not dealing with the interaction of openURL() and openFILE().

(However somebody with write access to the mozilla.org webpages should
definitely write an updated version of the whole "-remote" options, because
those changed two times between 0.8,0.9 and 1.0 releases and people are by now
totally confused how to make it work, because when they look up solutions in the
archives they don't work anymore.)

Comment 3

[Martin]

I may have a similar problem:
firefox -remote openFile"(/etc/passwd,new-tab)"
fails to open anything
while
firefox -remote openFile"(/etc/passwd,new-window)"
always successfully opens a new window.

PS: I'm running:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

Comment 4

[Erik Jensen]

Is this related to bug 267435?
For me, "openURL(http://google.com)" works like it is supposed to (new tab, as
per setting in preferences), but "openURL(http://google.com)" loads it in
current tab, like the problem with openFILE described here, which I also have.

Comment 5

[Erik Jensen]

Sorry, I meant openURL(google.com), without a protocol, opens in the current
tab, replacing what is there.

Comment 6

[Dirk Jagdmann]

Erik's comment gave me a hint for a workaround. If you want to open the file in
a new tab you have to prefix the filename with "file:". My Firefox now behaves
correctly if I issue a command like "openFILE(file:/etc/passwd,new-tab)".

So this is really a bug, that when the argument to openURL or openFILE is not
prefixed with a protocol (http,ftp,file or whatever) Mozilla/Firefox ignores any
new-tab settings and always opens in the current tab.

<a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=280636">bug 280636</a> has
fixes to the firefox start script which will fix the described behaviour as
well. I have thus marked this bug a a duplicate of that bug.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 280636 ***