292813 - window.open('', windowName) fails to find window if windowName is a background tab

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 326009

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, defect)

Description

[Jason]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050319
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050319

When calling window.open('', 'foo'), if a window named 'foo' is already open, a
handle to it is returned. (Which is as it should be.) This continues to work if
the 'foo' window is actually a tab in a browser window with multiple tabs,
unless it is not the tab currently being viewed; in that case, a brand-new
window is opened instead.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open a window named 'foo'.
2. Open another tab in the same window as foo, and give that tab focus (so the
'foo' window is in a background tab).
3. Open a 3rd window, or yet another tab; from that page, call window.open('',
'foo').  


Actual Results:  
Th window.open() call should have returned a handle to the already-open 'foo'
window (sitting in a background tab).  Instead, it opens a brand-new window
named 'foo', with no content.

This only occurs if the 'foo' window is in a background tab; if the 'foo'
window's tab is the one being shown to the user, everything works as expected.


Expected Results:  
No new window should have been opened.

Comment 1

[Jason]

Attachment: A simple test case

Open foo.html; it's got instructions on how to reproduce the bug.

Comment 2

[Jason]

The same problem can be seen in FireFox 1.0.3 on Windows.

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

This has been fixed on the trunk for a long time now....

Comment 4

[Jason]

I still see this behavior in a completely fresh, extension-free installation of Firefox 1.5.0.4 on a Windows 2000 box that has never had Firefox installed on it before.

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4

Sorry, but I've got users complaining about this one. =)  If there is a fix in the trunk, when would it be reasonable to expect it to make its way into released Firefox versions?  Or is it possible that the trunk code was rejected from Firefox, rolled back, etc?  (It sure seems like a year would be a long enough time frame for code to move from trunk to release .. but I don't want to make any unwarranted assumptions.)

Thanks.

Comment 5

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

The fix will be in Firefox 2.0.  It's not going into the security-and-crash-fixes-only 1.5.0.x releases, since it's not a security or crash fix...

I'm not quite sure why I claimed that this was long-fixed last June; it was actually fixed on Feb 21, 2006, by the checkin for bug 326009.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 326009 ***