464277 - Pref "Open new windows in a new tab instead" does not seem to be honored

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[Marcia Knous [:marcia]]

Seen while testing  Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1b2pre) Gecko/20081111 Minefield/3.1b2pre.

STR:
1. Go to Preferences | Tabs and make sure the checkbox "Open new windows in a new tab instead" is checked.
2. Go to a page and right click a link, making sure to select open link in a new window or open a new window.

Expected: Because I have that pref checked, the link would open in a new tab or my new window would open in a new tab.
Actual: When the pref is checked, everything opens in a new window.

whimboo mentioned there was some pref work remaining to be done but since I was trying to update the Litmus test cases I came across this discrepancy and wanted to make sure it is tracked.

Comment 1

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

I also see this with FF 3.0.3 and FF 2.0.0.17.

And I'm not sure it's a bug.  Shouldn't explictly asking for something to be opened in a window (from the context menu) override the "open new windows in a new tab" setting?

Comment 2

[Marcia Knous [:marcia]]

That could be the case, but I guess I am not understanding what the pref does since even opening a new window from the File menu results in the same thing if the pref is checked.

Comment 3

[Jesse Ruderman]

This pref affects what happens when you left-click on target="_blank" links in web pages (and a few other situations).  A more precise wording would be "When a web page tries to open a new window (and the page doesn't specify a size), open a new tab instead".  It was never intended to affect things like File > New Window.

Maybe "Open new pages in tabs instead of windows"?  Whatever Chrome says?