This is happening to me, as well, on Mac OS X 10.6.8, but only since I upgraded to the latest version of Firefox, 32.0.1. I can click an HTTP link in another application and Firefox will become the active application, but it will not load a new tab for the link, as expected. Instead, it just sits there. I have to go back to the other application and click the link a second time, at which point Firefox will correctly open a new tab and load the destination URL.

Previous thread for this issue

Justin,

I just took your observation and rolled back Firefox to the previous version 31.0. That fixed it! Might want to give it a try.

Thanks, fzrules! I don't generally like going backwards due to the security risks, but this is such an inconvenience that it might be worth it. It's also broken all of my custom Alfred workflows that auto-run web queries. Sigh.

I'm surprised more people haven't reported this being an issue! I wonder what commonality exists between our systems (running different versions of OS X) that causes this behavior for us, but not everyone?

Hopefully someone from Mozilla will take a look and fix the bug. I noticed they just released 32.0.2 but the release notes don't say anything about this issue.

I can confirm that this also happens, though with much less frequency, on an iMac running OS X 10.9.4. It shares no data or settings with my home machine.

Bugzilla reports have been filed for this issue:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1069864 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1017595 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1069864

There is also a bigger thread at:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1018542