502385 - Clicking link in Mail should open new Firefox tab

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[glpease]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9.1) Gecko/20090624 Firefox/3.5 AutoPager/0.5.2.2 (http://www.teesoft.info/)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9.1) Gecko/20090624 Firefox/3.5 AutoPager/0.5.2.2 (http://www.teesoft.info/)

In previous versions of Firefox, clicking a link in a Mail (OSX) message opened a new tab in the front-most window, and brought focus to the new tab. Command-clicking on the link opened a new tab, while keeping focus in the Mail application. In 3.5, either event causes the front-most tab to be over-written with the new page, though the change in focus remains consistent with previous versions. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. From OSX Mail (I've not tested with any other mail app), click a link
2. In previous versions of Firefox, a new tab will open with the new page
3. In Firefox 3.5, the front-most tab will be over-written with the new page
Actual Results:  
See above

Expected Results:  
See above

This isn't a major bug, but is very annoying. When an email message contains several links, I now have to open a tab, click a link, open apother tab, click a link, &c. I consider it a significant loss of functionality.

Comment 1

[Carlos Alén Silva]

Similar problem on Windows, Outlook Express 6: Clicking on links inside an e-mail won't open a new Firefox tab, instead, a "Firefox is already running..." error message will pop up. A new tab has to be created and the link pasted manually. 

Clicking on URL links in the desktop yields the same error message, "Firefox is already running..." The URL links have to be drag-dropped into tabs for them to work.

Windows XP SP3, Outlook Express 6, Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1) Gecko/20090624 Firefox/3.5

Comment 2

[aravindm]

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2.2) Gecko/20100316 Firefox/3.6.2

This works for me. Please update if it works fine by creating a new profile. 
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Basic+Troubleshooting#Make_a_new_profile.

Comment 3

[aravindm]

Also, please see if you can reproduce in the latest nightly
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/