769322 - Helper app not always suggesting the right app

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Ian Barlow (:ibarlow)]

Attachment: screenshot

I have the Autoblog app installed, it's a car blog. I just went to www.blogto.com (a blog about Toronto) in Nightly, and the helper popped up suggesting I open this in Autoblog. 

We should investigate why the helper might be making recommendations like this, that are simply wrong.

Comment 1

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

I see the helper app notification for any page that contains an image. We should ignore helper apps that register file types that Firefox can handle natively.

Comment 2

[Ian Barlow (:ibarlow)]

Any resolution on this? I spent all weekend getting helper app popups suggesting wrong/weird apps with which to open a page.

We might consider pulling this, and only passing a user on to another app if

a. we can't handle the file type natively, as Kevin mentioned, and 
b. the URL has specific directions to open another app

Comment 3

[Wesley Johnston (:wesj)]

I think we're going to move this to context menus for now, bug 769454. Waiting for review there...

That will basically give us b.

Comment 4

[Matt Brubeck (:mbrubeck)]

If we ever go back to the old UI (with the doorhanger notification), then I think we could fix many/most of the incorrect popups by looking only at top-level document requests, and ignoring requests for images and other sub-resources.  (For example, the Twitter app popup seems to be triggered by sites that make XHR requests for JSON resources hosted on twitter.com.)

Comment 5

[BMO Automation]

We have completed our launch of our new Firefox on Android. The development of the new versions use GitHub for issue tracking. If the bug report still reproduces in a current version of [Firefox on Android nightly](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix) an issue can be reported at the [Fenix GitHub project](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/). If you want to discuss your report please use [Mozilla's chat](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix#Connect_to_Matrix) server https://chat.mozilla.org and join the [#fenix](https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fenix:mozilla.org) channel.