424239 - mailto: links should open in Gmail if you are already logged into Gmail

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Jason Spiro]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Build Identifier: 

When you click on a mailto: link on the web, if you are currently logged into Gmail in another tab, Fx should take you to the Gmail compose URL to quickly compose a new email to the mailto link you clicked.

(Yes, in some rare cases, users won't want this.  But in those cases, users could right-click the link > Copy Email Address; then they could open another mail client and paste in the address.  But most of the time, for Gmail users, the right choice is to take them to Gmail.)

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

Do you realize how dangerous this is ? This means that you give gmail (= a website) permission to intercept data from other websites (here, the mailto links). That can never be a general purpose mechanism. Don't forget that gmail is just a website for Firefox, not an application or handler.

In the meantime, you can use the Gmail 2 Extension at <http://lifehacker.com/software/exclusive-lifehacker-download/better-gmail-2-firefox-extension-for-new-gmail-320618.php>. You also need the Greasemonkey extesnion for this to work.

Comment 2

[Jesse Ruderman]

There is room to improve the discoverability of the web-handlers feature in Firefox 3.  It might even make sense to ship URLs for a few major webmail providers with Firefox.  But automatically guessing that you want to use Gmail seems a bit extreme.  

(It appears that bug 402771 made "mailto:" not prompt by default; I'm not sure why that decision was made.)

Comment 3

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

This is a mass search for bugs that are in the Firefox General component, are
UNCO, and have not been changed for 800 days and have an unspecified version. 

Reporter, can you please update to Firefox 3.6.10, create a fresh profile,
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/managing+profiles, and test again. If you
still see the bug, please update this bug. If the issue is gone, please set the
resolution to RESOLVED > WORKSFORME.