User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3 Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3 If the user middle-mouse clicks on a link that leads to a file that is NOT a website, then Firefox still creates a new, empty tab and additionally displays a download dialog. The new tab is useless, it contains nothing. It is annoying for the user to close this useless tab. Why should someone middle-mouse click (== "open in new tab") on a link that does not lead to another webpage? 1. Accidentally 2. If the user does not know that Firefox won't be able to display this link. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Go (for example) to: http://www.archive.org/details/DuckandC1951 2. Middle mouse click (for example) on the link entitled "MPEG4" (http://www.archive.org/download/DuckandC1951/DuckandC1951.mp4) 3. Actual Results: 1. An additional, empty tab is created and 2. a download dialog is opened. Expected Results: Only the download dialog should be opened, not the additional tab. This could be solved if Firefox would check the MIME type of the file that is linked before creating the new tab. If the MIME type is something that Firefox can not display in the new tab, than don't create it.

No, bug 241972 fixed this for normal clicks. This bug is about middle-clicking. For example, middle-click on the nightly builds links: the new tab doesn't close automatically (tested with Firefox 2.0.0.3pre). That's bug 346561.

Here's the site with the links I mentioned above: http://www.mozilla.org/developer/#builds