283551 - Modal Dialogs from hidden tabs on front tab

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 123913

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[Ian Dunbar]

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

If I middle click on a link to open a tab in the background, and for some reason
the server is unreachable (invalid domain or whatever), it pops up a modal
dialog saying something like "could not connect to site, blah blah...".



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. put a site in your hosts file pointing to 127.0.0.1 (to simulate bad server)
2. open a page with a link to that site
3. middle click on the link in a background tab


Actual Results:  
* get a dialog box saying unable to connect.
* be annoyed.

Expected Results:  
I see a few issues with this:

* Dialogs from other tabs should never interrupt me when they are in the background.

* Even if it's in the foreground, I don't really want a modal dialog that I have
to click "ok" on anyway. Why not a HTML-ified Error message on the page itself?

* there is something "funny" with the address box at the top of the browser
after getting such boxes. It doesn't always contain the text of the URL that
failed. Sometimes switching back to the original tab, and back again corrects
this, though sometimes it doesn't (seems to depend somehow on if I switch to the
tab just before the dialog box, or after).

Comment 1

[Ben Fowler]

You probably want to look at bugs featuring Netwrok Error dialogues, or
XUL Error Pages.

Comment 2

[Benoit Hudson]

(In reply to comment #0)
> If I middle click on a link to open a tab in the background, and for some reason
> the server is unreachable (invalid domain or whatever), it pops up a modal
> dialog saying something like "could not connect to site, blah blah...".

Similarly if I load up a self-reloading page like nytimes.com and leave it in
some random tab somewhere.

Worse is that you get a modal dialog that (on linux/fvwm anyway) pops up no
matter what application I'm using at the time, somewhere randomly on the screen.
 If I don't deal with the problem immediately (which I shouldn't need to), it
can be hell to find the "connection timed out" modal dialog by the time I get
back to the browser.

Comment 3

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Specifics around XUL error pages and showing failed URLs are already fixed in
other bugs, but in general this is "tab-modal rather than app-modal," and that's
bug 123913

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 123913 ***