510745 - CTRL-LeftClick Works Like Left Click Alone On Certain Web Links, Such as Yahoo Mail

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Keyboard Navigation, defect)

Description

[Ben N]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.13) Gecko/2009073022 Firefox/3.0.13 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.13) Gecko/2009073022 Firefox/3.0.13 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

On certain sites, CTRL-Left Click does not work on weblinks as expected and instead works as if only Left Click was pressed.  This means that the link opens in the same tab rather than opening a new tab.  Right clicking and selecting "open in new tab" and middle mouse button work as expected.

This behavior has been noted on Yahoo Mail Classic webmail (mail.yahoo.com), when clicking on messages and folders.  There have also been unverified reports of it occurring on ebay.co.uk.  Further information on this is located on the provided URL which describes the issue on the Mozilla Forums.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Sign in to a Yahoo Mail webmail account (mail.yahoo.com)
2. Left click on "Inbox" on the left hand side
3. CTRL-Left click on any message in the inbox.
Actual Results:  
Message opens in the same window, replacing the inbox folder display.

Expected Results:  
Message should have opened in a separate tab.

This issue has been documented as occurring in safe mode (with all customizations off) and on two separate systems (thanks to smsmith).  It may be the result of some specialized script that Yahoo is running which suppresses this behavior.  Setting "browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction = 0" did not solve this bug.

Comment 1

[Tim (fmdeveloper)]

Reporter -> Are you still experiencing this issue with the latest version of Firefox 3.6.15? Does the issue occur with the latest nightly? http://nightly.mozilla.org/

Comment 2

[Ben N]

Just checked this on the latest nightly build (firefox-4.2a1pre) and the latest Firefox 3.6 version (v3.6.16), the bug is still reproducible on two separate machines running WinXP when accessing Yahoo Webmail Classic.

Comment 3

[Tim (fmdeveloper)]

Ben -> Are you still experiencing this issue with the latest version of Firefox 6? Does the issue occur with the latest nightly? http://nightly.mozilla.org/

How do you switch to Yahoo Webmail Classic?

Comment 4

[Ben N]

That is a good point.  As of about a month ago, they've phased out Yahoo Classic and updated their main webmail to a newer release.  The new version of Yahoo doesn't allow ANY sort of opening mail in a new tab via middle button or CTRL-Left Click.  They've completely replaced their standard HTML controls with overrides, complete with their own right click menu.

So I guess we can call this bug closed.  The new version for whatever reason hates opening new tabs uniformly by mouse or keyboard commands, and there's not much to be done about that.