How to allow tabs in dialog boxes again?
Even though the 'always show tab bar' is set, it never shows automatically in a dialogbox window, and that's fine. However, in FF 3, if I right-clicked on a link and selected show in new tab, it worked fine by opening a tab in that dialog box, and displaying the tab bar with the tabs.
In 4 it's all messed up. If I right-click on open in new tab, it opens into a new tab in an existing full screen window which isn't even the parent window of the dialog box. It was just the most recently opened full-screen window.
The bigger problem is that I have context-menu items which auto-load in a new tab. Well, it does open the tab in the same dialog box window, but it doesn't show it. You can't access it. No tab or tab bar is displayed. There's nothing to indicate that it actually opened. I found out it opened pages in the background when I went to close the window and it said 'you have 4 tabs open'.
Does anyone know how I can restore the appropriate functionality to FF 4?
Modified by macahi
All Replies (6)
Please ignore this reply and read further down
Do you maintain the site that you're describing? Is the dialog generated using showModialDialog or window.open with a dialog feature? These were changed recently to fix some bugs, and it may well be that some new ones were introduced. (This forum focuses on end-user support. You can find more web development help on the mozillaZine Web Development board. Separate forum, separate registration. Please note the tips in the Sticky Post at the top of the forum before posting.)
If this is someone else's site, you might mention these problems to the webmaster.
Modified by jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
When dealing with a FF upgrade, it's far more likely that issues are due to a deliberate decision to remove, disable, move or add functionality which is different that what we users are used to. In those cases, it is also likely that others have come across the situation and have discovered the cryptic about:config code to restore the useful functionality, or have found or written a plug-in to put back what FF shouldn't have messed with in the first place, hence, my decision to post here.
No they are not my sites, and yes, it is many sites, any site I've found which opens a dialog window. Example of a public site is here: http://bugsafari.blogspot.com/ Find a Comments link under one of the posts on the above site to open a dialog box. Right-click on any link and select open in new tab. Where did it open? The parent full-screen window right? Ok, now, leave all the windows open, and open another full screen window. Go back to the dialog box and repeat. Now where did it open?
The above example is not a situation where I would normally want to open in a new tab, but I'm using it to demonstrate that it's a FF 4 issue and not a site issue.
That's issue #1. In order to show issue #2, you'll have to install the TinEye plug-in.
Okay, that example is really helpful in further researching this.
Starting in Firefox 4, it is intended behavior that a dialog window not be able to have new tabs. However, the developers may have applied this principle to too many styles of windows merely because the window is "small."
A bug already has been filed (many, actually) complaining about this change, and suggesting some tweaks to this feature so that it only affects popups which were truly intended to behave like dialogs. I am not aware of any current workaround, but maybe one will appear in the later bug at some point:
Current functionality: Bug 606678 "Open Link in New Tab" shouldn't add tabs to popups
Requested change: Bug 644729 – Popup window with all toolbars visible causes new tabs to open in another browser window
An official change may be quite a ways off, but there might be a userscript or add-on fix. I'm going to look into this a bit more if I get time.
Edit: Because posts on a bug get sent to everyone on a long mailing list, it is considered poor etiquette (spamming) to add "me too" comments to a bug. However, you can "vote" for a bug to get fixed, so it might be worth registering on Bugzilla to do that if people are affected by this on a day-to-day basis.
Modified by jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
Thank you for the information. At least that makes it clear that it's not a bug. It is as I suspected a deliberate decision made by the folks at FF. What I didn't expect is that they're not letting us disable this new 'feature' as they normally do.
It's too bad they didn't think it through, but that happens.
Actually, you can replicate this problem on any page by pasting this bookmarklet to the location bar and pressing Enter. It opens the same page in a new window set to a specific (quite large) size and Ctrl+click opens tabs in the previous window.
javascript:void(window.open(location.href,"_blank","width=1024,height=768"));
Displaying the window first and then resizing it avoids the problem (unless blocked by the user's script preferences). However, that's a workaround for webmasters, not end users.
I created a Greasemonkey userscript to use temporarily. It adds a button to pages detected to be in a dialog window so you can reload them in a regular window. I'm sure as a 0.1 version it's not perfect, but hopefully it will help.
Bouncing this back up in case anyone has an actual answer for a workaround or a fix for this issue.