460153 - Provide about:config options to open New Tab from Locationbar, Bookmarks & History

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[ronin.achilles]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1b1) Gecko/20081007 Firefox/3.1b1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1b1) Gecko/20081007 Firefox/3.1b1

I am using 3.1b1 and I see that BrowserLoadUrl is not defined, which means that the ability to open New Tabs from URL bar is lost (using JS).

We already have a hidden option browser.search.openintab to open searches in a New Tab.

Can we please have similar options for URLs, Bookmarks & History
browser.url.openintab
browser.bookmarks.openintab
browser.history.openintab


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[ronin.achilles]

Copying Beltzner and Connor; not sure who takes care of these things. Hoping one of you will take this forward and assign it to the right person.

Comment 2

[ronin.achilles]

To add to my opening comment, when I say that the ability to open New Tab from URL is lost, I mean the ability to open New Tab by default (with Enter instead of Alt+Enter) is lost.

Comment 3

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

It seems that Bug 454109 was responsible for this.

Comment 4

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

Build 20080925043740 works and build 20080925053758 fails.

Comment 5

[ronin.achilles]

Dao: Can you confirm if Bug 454109 was responsible for this? If yes, will you be able to provide a fix?

Comment 6

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

I don't understand what this bug is about.

Comment 7

[ronin.achilles]

@Dao:

In the attachment https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=337345 from Bug 454109, the function BrowserLoadURL has been removed and (with my limited technical knowledge) think that it has been replaced by 'handlecommand' method.

BrowserLoadURL function was used in various ways (extensions, userchrome.js) etc., to open a new tab from the location bar (by default, instead of using Alt+Enter)

The aim of this bug is to:
1. either revert the BrowserLoadURL function (which I think is redundant; guess thats why it was removed) OR
2. provide hidden options (as mentioned in Bug description) to open new tabs from URL, Bookmarks and History, thereby not requiring to have the BrowserLoadURL function at all

I think option 2 is preferable since it will be a non intrusive way of providing users with the option of opening New Tabs from URL/Bookmarks/History if they so wish.

Not sure if I am technically accurate here, but hope you get the point :)

Comment 8

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Yes, I think 1 is less desirable, as we don't need that function in browser code. If you also think that 2 is preferable, it might be a good idea to morph this bug to reflect that.

Comment 9

[ronin.achilles]

Changing Bug title as per @Dao's comment.

@Dao: Will you be kind enough to take this up and provide a patch? coz I am pretty much handicapped as far as coding is concerned.

Comment 11

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

We don't block on hidden prefs going away.  Hidden prefs going away is generally a net win for code maintainability.

browser.search.openinnewtab was a legacy of the search dialog that we dropped after 1.5 which had a checkbox.  I'm actually in favour of removing that, rather than adding three more codepaths for hidden prefs.

Marking WONTFIX, extensions can do this themselves if they really want to.