778566 - Composition: cannot open url in quoted text in reply email

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 695142

(MailNews Core :: Composition, defect)

Description

[Derek Williams]

Attachment: Screen Shot 2012-07-29 at 19.56.53.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:15.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/15.0
Build ID: 20120724191344

Steps to reproduce:

I clicked Reply to a received email.

In the Write window that opened, were URL of various sites.

I clicked one to open the site that it referenced.


Actual results:

Nothing.


Expected results:

The URL should open the site it is linked to, just the same as it does in the received page.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

You are in the Editor(Composition window. Clicking on a URL selects it and it's unexpected (at least to me) to open the URL if you are in an Editor.

Comment 2

[Derek Williams]

When I click on a URL I expect it open a site.  If the URL displayed is not active then it should display as plain text, not underlined blue text.  In any case I don't see why I shouldn't be able to open a site from an email I am composing to double check something.

Comment 3

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

Based on how links normally work (including the ability to drag-and-drop them), doing this would make it basically impossible to edit the text of a link, which is bad for obvious reasons.

Comment 4

[Derek Williams]

In which case it is plain text and should be represented as plain text.

Comment 5

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

That doesn't work either, since anchors whose text content is not the URL itself (e.g. <a href="http://www.example.com/">Example</a>) need some kind of visual affordance to indicate that they are anchors.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I can see both sides. For example, perhaps a bad one because it is not message body, one can open attachments that have been added. OTOH, I personnaly would never expect a link in editor to open.

Comment 7

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Derek, I agree that we need a way of opening URLs from composition.

However, your proposed solution of just single-left-clicking the link to open the URL in browser is problematic per Jim's comment 3, because it would make it much harder to edit the link text, which is a more important scenario in composition compared to viewing the link.

So we need to find a better solution for this problem.
Like this:

Bug 695142 - Implement ways of opening links (URLs) from message composition in Browser (Ctrl+Click, "Open Link in Browser" context menu)

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thanks Thomas