User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (Squid; I86; Linux) Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4a) Gecko/20030401 When a link is opened from outside of the browser (e.g. by clicking on a link in an e-mail message), the link is occasionally opened inside a window that has been created as a javascript pop-up window. This is undesirable, as such windows are often of small size, have toolbars, tab bar and status bar switched off, or are unsuitable in other ways (perhaps they have been opened off the screen). If you open in a new tab, then the tab UI is not displayed (this is another way of causing Bug 143866 to occur). I would suggest that windows opened via Javascript (and possibly via links with target = anything other than _blank) should be ignored for opening pages requested from outside the browser. Reproducible: Sometimes Steps to Reproduce: 1. Visit a site that opens a popup window 2. Open an e-mail with a link in it 3. Click that link Actual Results: Sometimes the link is opened in the popup window Expected Results: The link should always be opened in the main browser window

The AIM Express web app ( http://www.aim.com/get_aim/express/aim_expr.adp?aolp= ) is where I've run into this problem. AFAIK, the last Mozilla window to have focus is the one that external links are opened. Mozilla should try to avoid opening external links in javascript opened windows because they are usually being used for something special. Actually, it might be nice if external links were always opened in a new _blank window.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 75138 ***

I don't believe this is a duplicate. I did consider adding comments to that bug, but there are substantial differences. That bug is about a control to generally change the behaviour of where opened links appear (i.e. a choice between new window, new tab or existing window). This bug is about a specific problem with the algorithm used to select an existing window (for either of the last two options), and therefore fixing bug 75138 will not necessarily fix this bug. Perhaps the scope of 75138 could be expanded to include this, but at present it doesn't.

The behavior is as expected. Mailnews uses the most recently used (i.e. has foreground) window. If the popup was the last browser window with foreground prop. then the link opens there. I don't see a real bug here. For a better handling for this see the bugs bug 35578, bug 180042, and bug 75138. Please resolve this bug as INVALID or as a duplicate of one of the mentioned bugs.

First of all, this is a problem, so I don't think INVALID is the right way of dealing with this. If the link is opened in a javascript popup window, the window it ends up in may lack toolbars, status bar, tab bar and menus and may be of a fixed size that is too small to display the content of the linked page. All of these are serious problems that impact usability and will confuse users. Bug 35778 suggests fixing this by changing the default behaviour of clicking a link to opening a new window. Certainly there should be a preference to control this behaviour, but this bug will still exist whenever the pref is set to 'reuse existing windows' or 'open in new tab', both of which _should_ exist, IMO. Bug 180042 is about assigning focus to the window that received the link when opening a link in another window. Note that it is an orthogonal issue to the one in this bug, and doesn't prevent the problems noted in the first paragraph above. Bug 75138 is related to the discussion of bug 35778, and is about introducing a preference for whether or not existing windows are reused. The same objections apply as to that bug; when 'reuse existing window' or 'new tab in existing window' is selected the problems noted above still occur. This bug is related solely to the behaviour in choosing which window to use. *You* may expect it to use the window which had foreground most recently regardless of whether that window has all the features of a full browser window, I personally expect it to only consider windows with default settings (i.e. those that are resizeable and have menubars, toolbars, scrollbars and status bars as per user preferences), as that is the more useful and less confusing behaviour.

(In reply to comment #5) > Bug 35778 [...] I meant, of course, bug 35578. Sorry.

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Reopening. This problem still seems to occur when the preference is set to 'open new tab'.

so what you don't want is a chromeless window. Not saying you'd have better luck, but you might get better results hitching your wagon to one of the other bugs, or getting dirty enough to understand the code to create a solution.

I don't see a good summary here to reproduce the problem. I think we need an URL that opens said JS-created window, and a summary of the important settings where this happens. Until this this is incomplete.