577467 - Middlemouse.contentLoadURL is confusing and causes a problem at Google Mail web interface // GMail links don't open from middle-clicking, no link context menu items

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[rosnanocorp]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; ru; rv:2.0b1) Gecko/20100630 Firefox/4.0b1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; ru; rv:2.0b1) Gecko/20100630 Firefox/4.0b1

E-mails open in new tab on ctrl+leftclick, but when you try middle-click, e-mail titles aren't recognised as links and if you have URL in clipboard, it loads instead.

On a related note, is it necessary to make it set to true by default on linux?

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[u279076]

This seems to be another use case for the issue causing bug 504714.

Comment 2

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

This bug was reported using a pre-release version of Firefox 4. Now that Firefox 4.0.1 final has been released, can you please update and retest your bug? A fresh profile would be a good starting place to test, 
http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Managing+profiles. If you continue to see the issue, can you please update this bug with your results?

Filter: firefox4prebugsunco

Comment 3

[[:Aleksej]]

With autoscrolling enabled, the links don’t open from middle-clicking.

I’d guess the AJAX links are not real links.  However they do open from Ctrl-clicking.  Is that done by Firefox itself, or does GMail process the Ctrl-click?

Comment 4

[[:Aleksej]]

(In reply to Aleksej [:Aleksej] from comment #3)
And right-clicking opens a context menu not specific to links.

Comment 5

[u279076]

Any errors in Error Console? Any chance you could mock up a minimized testcase?

Comment 6

[[:Aleksej]]

Error Console is very very slow there (hangs for minutes).

Comment 7

[Dr. David Alan Gilbert]

There's loads of places this happens; it seems to be the difference between a simple link (which middle click always opens in a new tab) and some magic javascript (which tends to open the pasted url from the clipboard).  I guess the problem is if the link is JS then who knows what it's going to do, so you can't guarantee to open a new tab?  But the user has no way of knowing what's going to happen - so I think the UI needs to change to signify a simple link differently - either by a different link highlight or perhaps by changing the mouse cursor depending on what's going to happen.

Comment 8

[Grey Nicholson (they/them)]

The 2nd part of this is bug 366945: middle-clicking loads a URL in the clipboard (which is fixed in Firefox 57).

The first part: I believe that in Gmail, each row in the list of emails is not actually a link. The page uses JavaScript to open the email when you click it, and to open the email in a new tab when you Ctrl+click it. So this is the page's fault, not Firefox's.

So I think this is not a bug.