654621 - Firefox on Android will not launch apps who have registered an intent filter for action android.intent.action.VIEW, for an arbitrary scheme.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 653833

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Rob Brambley]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_7) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/12.0.742.12 Safari/534.30
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Linux armv7l; rv:2.1.1) Gecko/20110415 Firefox/4.0.2pre Fennec/4.0.1

On Android, you can add something like this to an application's manifest:

        <activity android:name="com.awesome.poo.AwesomeApp" android:configChanges="keyboard|keyboardHidden|orientation">
            <intent-filter>
                <action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW"/>
                <category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT" />
                <category android:name="android.intent.category.BROWSABLE" />
                <data android:scheme="whateverrandomscheme"/>
            </intent-filter>
        </activity>

And, when I use the native Android Browser, and browse to a URL that begins with that scheme (e.g. whateverrandomscheme://my/awesome/place), it will allow a user to actually launch that URL with any app that has registered to handle it. However, Firefox on Android simply gives an error message.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create an Android app in which you register an activity to handle a specific scheme, as in the "Details" section.
2. Install this Android app on your Android phone.
3. Browse to a URL with that scheme in Firefox.

Actual Results:  
Firefox shows an error.

Expected Results:  
If Firefox doesn't support the URL that you browse to, it should support launching into other applications.

Comment 1

[Brad Lassey [:blassey] (use needinfo?)]

the helper apps addon adds this functionality https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/mobile/addon/270900/

Comment 2

[Rob Brambley]

Okay, I see that this addon works. However, it should be handled without an add-on, since this is the native Android behavior. Please consider adding this – normal users will not necessarily go looking for this addon to perform "expected" Android behavior.

(In reply to comment #1)
> the helper apps addon adds this functionality
> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/mobile/addon/270900/

Comment 3

[Brad Lassey [:blassey] (use needinfo?)]

good to hear that the add-on takes care of the behavior you're looking for, taking that into the product is bug 653833