615866 - Add preference to disable "External links from within app tabs should always open in new tabs" feature

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[Alice0775 White]

Build Identifier: 
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0b8pre) Gecko/20101130 Firefox/4.0b8pre ID:20101130030317

After landing Bug 575561, there are no way to open a link(different domain) in current AppTab.  
This is lack of one of the basic tabbrowser function.

So, Add preference to disable "External links from within app tabs should always open in new tabs" feature.

Even if disabling the feature, I can open such link in new tab by Ctrl+Click or Middle click if I want.

Comment 1

[:Margaret Leibovic]

App tabs are supposed to behave differently from normal tabs. I don't know if this counts as a regression because it is part of the spec for app tabs; it just wasn't implemented until recently.

Comment 2

[Alice0775 White]

Ok,
But,the problem is there are no way to open such a link in current.

Comment 3

[Alice0775 White]

When I Open www.google.co.jp in AppTab,
In top menu "Web Images Videos Maps News Shopping Gmail more ",
Some links open in new tab and others opens in current tab.
This behavior confuses user. And it is not consistent I think.

If not a Apptab, all links in  the top menu open in Current tab,In this case it is behavior of the very coherent.

The criterion(domain name) of Bug 575561 confuses  user.

Comment 4

[:Margaret Leibovic]

(In reply to comment #3)
> When I Open www.google.co.jp in AppTab,
> In top menu "Web Images Videos Maps News Shopping Gmail more ",
> Some links open in new tab and others opens in current tab.
> This behavior confuses user. And it is not consistent I think.

This is because Google decided to give some of those links new subdomains, but not others, e.g. Images and Shopping use www.google.com, but Videos and Maps use video.google.com and maps.google.com.

In bug 608791, we decided to compare host strings to decide whether or not a link is external. It is unfortunate that this heuristic doesn't work well for Google, but I'm not sure how we would solve this problem.

Comment 5

[Alice0775 White]

In yahoo mail classic(http://mail.yahoo.com),
Go Contacts, then open in current,  and go Mail then open in new tab. 
This is also strange. Bug 575561 cause such a ridiculous behavior.

Comment 6

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

This behaviour is as-designed, and will not be controlled by a preference. The issue specific to google.com warrants a better heuristic or mechanism for controlling this behaviour, which should be filed as a different bug.