499527 - Gmail mailto: handling loses back button page history

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: File Handling, defect)

Description

[Gordon P. Hemsley [:GPHemsley]]

I have the application handling for mailto: links set to Gmail. (I'm not sure if it's the same as the one supposed to be included by default, as I recall adding it before the default one was approved. However, I did have to choose it again from the drop-down menu, so it may be default after all.)

When clicking on a mailto: link, it opens up Gmail in the current tab (which is annoying, in and of itself). When clicking on the back button, though, it goes back to the page previous—meaning that the Gmail page overwrote the current page that had the mailto: link on it.

Naturally, it should consider the mailto: link as a new page in the history, instead of overwriting the current page.

Comment 1

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

ctrl-click, middle-click, and right-click context menu are the way to open links in new tabs, why should mailto: links be different?

Comment 2

[Gordon P. Hemsley [:GPHemsley]]

(In reply to comment #1)
> ctrl-click, middle-click, and right-click context menu are the way to open
> links in new tabs, why should mailto: links be different?

The link should be treated as opening in a new window (i.e. as if it had target="_blank"), since it would otherwise be expected to open in a new application altogether. After that, the window/tab setting would intercept it properly.

But that's not even the main point of this bug....

Comment 4

[Eamon Nerbonne]

This bug is incidentally trivially reproducable by clicking on any bugzilla uses's name above a comment here.

Comment 5

[Samuel Bronson]

This is still happening in esr 31 ...

Comment 6

[Patrick Hubenthal]

I can reproduce this in FF 56, and I suspect it's the same bug as these:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=624104
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1223279

I've noted a few more details at bug 624104.