If you open a url in a new tab via xremote (eg from xchat), then it always goes to the front. Instead, it should load in the background if browser.tabs.load-in-background is set. The usual use case is to see a URL on IRC/etc that looks interesting, and then load it up to look at later afer I've finished doing whatever I'm in the middle of. I can see an argument that the externally loaded case is different to the 'loaded from a browser' case, but I'm not sure that I'm convinced by it.

NB: there is no pref named browser.tabs.load-in-background. But lest you implement something that uses the actual pref with nearly that name, know that other bugs have already been written relying on a different pref. This bug is basically the Linux version of (nominally cross-platform but so far patched only on Windows) bug 255123.

Interested to see if this gets fixed with the bug fix in post above this one.

OK, so I misspelt it. Its the pref that controls whether rightclick->open_link_in_new_tab pops the new tab to the foreground or not. See http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/browser/base/content/browser.js#2593 Its on by default; no idea whether thats changed since I filed this. Its not the same issue - the other bug is a windows thing, not a tab thing; I don't care (for the purposes of this bug) whether the window comes to the foreground or now.

Really, this as reported is invalid, at least for Firefox, since it uses browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground to control external link locations (separate from content-links you manually open in a tab, since those are different use cases, and indeed have different defaults.

(In reply to comment #0) > The usual use case is to see a URL on IRC/etc that looks interesting, and then > load it up to look at later afer I've finished doing whatever I'm in the middle > of. I can see an argument that the externally loaded case is different to the > 'loaded from a browser' case, but I'm not sure that I'm convinced by it. Is this what happens when looking at, for example, a bunch of forum (or bug) links in Thunderbird email. I want to click, delete, click, delete, click, delete on three messages in a row and have it open three (or twenty!) tabs with info; then close Thunderbird and look at the open tabs one at a time. Older versions of Firefox USED TO do this. I think it changed around .8 or .9.

Mass resolving a bunch of old bugs in the x-remote component in preparation for archiving it. If this bug is still valid and useful, please move it to the "Toolkit: Startup and Profile System" component and reopen it.