Links opening in new Firefox Window instead of Tab :-(

OK,

So twhirl has no way of influencing AIR's behaviour.

While I'm at it, is there anyway of tweaking the AIR runtime btw ? a .plist ? a pref app ?

Thanks to everyone for confirming my initial doubts :-)

Very annoying behaviour.

Firefox blames Twhirl. Twhirl blames Air. I feel sad. :-(

The Tab Mix Plus extension fixes this for Firefox 2 by the way - but this extension isn't yet available for Firefox 3.

Actually there is a way to avoid the problem. You have to set htmlLoader.navigateInSystemBrowser to false in order to prevent it opening the links in the default browser.

This is what the documentation says about navigateInSystemBrowser:
" Specifies whether navigation of the root frame of the HTML content (such as when the user clicks a link, when the window.location property is set, or when calling window.open()) results in navigation in the HTMLLoader object (false) or in the default system web browser (true). Set this property to true if you want all navigation to occur in the system web browser (not in the HTMLLoader object). "

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/A...

Alex

This is really frustrating and is the primary reason I don't use Twhirl regularly. Has there been any updates or communication from Adobe on a fix? What about the previous comment? Is that a fix?

Any eta on fix ?

We didn't get an ETA from Adobe for fixing this. Hopefully it is solved in the AIR 1.1 release, which should be available in a few days.

Updating to AIR 1.1 didn't fix the problem for me on OS X 10.5.3.

Interestingly enough, Twhirl is the ONLY application that is trying to open Firefox.app instead of my system default one (Minefield.app - Leopard-optimized version of FF3), so I think it is something within Twhirl.

Furthermore, my other AIR apps DO open a tab in Minefield, as they should.

Rafael,

Same exact thing here. So the problem is not air but Twhirl. Hey Twhirl team, how about a fix now that we know the problem is on your end and not with air?

Well, actually I'd be happy if it would be a problem in twhirl, because then I could solve it!

This problem affects ONLY AIR applications, so if all other (native) apps use another browser, that has nothing to do with this issue.

To give you some technical background about this issue: twhirl is based on Flash and the Flex framework. There is just one way to actually open a URL in an external system browser from these kind of AIR applications. There are no options we could send with the URL that can influence how, where or by which application that URL is captured and opened in the end.

For reference, the call used to do this is navigateToURL().

I would be interested to know which other AIR applications you are using that open a link in another browser?

Rafael Fonseca, I'd love to hear which Air apps that open links in new tabs.

Most Air apps like the Pownce client, Spaz (another Twitter client) and others all have bugs registered for this behaviour, and they all seem to agree it's Adobes fault (though it looks like it only happens when used with Firefox as the default browser).

It also looks like it's a very old bug, so I can't understand why Adobe can't seem to fix it.

After reading around the web, Marco's reply is absolutely right. Many (all?) Adobe AIR apps are experiencing this exact same issue particularly when Firefox is set as the default browser.

This is an Adobe AIR issue, not a Twhirl one, so I would highly suggest that everyone go the this thread and add your voice asking Adobe to fix it: http://getsatisfaction.com/adobe/topi...

Per David Coletta, Adobe Employee:

"Just wanted to say, we are aware of this problem with navigateToURL() in AIR when Firefox/Mac is the default browser, and we are tracking it. To the best of our knowledge it is only a problem on the Mac, not with Firefox for Windows.

I can't promise if or when it will be fixed, but I hope that it's at least some comfort that it's on our list"

You can find his reply here: http://getsatisfaction.com/adobe/topi...

Scott,

thanks ;-) I'm not sure if this issue has been solved on Windows with one of the last AIR releases, but originally it was more prominent there than on OS X.

Even the official release notes from Adobe for AIR contained a workaround to solve the issue on Windows.

Anyway, I share everyone's feelings here that this is a really annoying thing, but as you pointed out, it cannot be solved from within twhirl.

Marco

I understand that the point is the Adobe AIR framework, as I have been recently finding some other issues on it, which makes me think it's not quite finished yet.

The problem is that even though Firefox is NOT set as my default browser, Twhirl is still trying to open it.

When I said other AIR apps were not doing the same thing, I was reporting what I experienced. Last time I've tried navigateToUrl() on an AIR app, the framework was in beta, and it worked like a charm.

Did anyone experience that with AIR 1.0? Or beta/alpha?

that's interesting. i've been having problems with all my air apps opening url's into text editors (coda).

just switched my system default browser from firefox to safari and all's fine now.

As expected I am having the same issue, but whats worst with OS X is Firefox just complains that you are trying to have more then one instance of FF 3 so for me I cant open any link.