Franz: External links open in service webview instead of browser

Created on 9 Nov 2017 · 7Comments · Source: meetfranz/franz

Hi. I would appreciate hearing your opinion on this. I like Franz for it's simple design but sometimes I have to restart Franz to reset services when they loaded external links in the same window and I want to go back to their "serviceURL".

So, I'm now studying to fix this issue by making index.js scan for external links and preventing Franz to load them. Is it suitable for recipes to do such pre-process?

Expected Behavior

Always open external links in a new window

Possible Solution

For recipe-side, avoid loading such links in Franz as follows :

module.exports = Franz => class SomeService extends Franz {
    events = {
        'dom-ready': '_scanForExternalLinks',
    }

    _scanForExternalLinks(event) {
        [].forEach.call(document.querySelectorAll("a"),
            e => {
                if (e.host !== window.location.host)
                    e.setAttribute("onclick", "window.open(this.href); return false;");
            })
    }
};

Or, for client-side, I think there are some options :

Force always open external links in other browser window
Load serviceURL when invoked by "reset service" menu
As long as it does not spoil the current Franz design, add "home" button somewhere

tmlinks

Source

koma-private

👍1

Most helpful comment

Related: when I open links from gmail they open a new chrome window, but don't load the URL

eddowding on 14 Nov 2017

👍6

All 7 comments

Related: when I open links from gmail they open a new chrome window, but don't load the URL

eddowding on 14 Nov 2017

👍6

For me it's not only Gmail, but all the other applications (Telegram, Whatsapp ..) as well. As soon as I click on a link, a new chrome window will be opened, but it does not load the URL.

batmel on 17 Nov 2017

👍1

I may have found a cause of the new browser window problem.

When I was debugging my Teamwork Projects recipe, I noticed a strange behavior of a print button located at gantt chart page. This button usually opens a new window showing a "Generating printable document..." message untll printing data is ready, then opens a print dialog of system when I use Teamwork Projects with other browsers.

But with Franz, it just opens a blank window and I cannot proceed to print out dialog. Teamwork Projects opens a new window by calling window.open() function as follows:

this.printWindow = window.open("", "", "width=" + window.innerWidth + ",height=" + window.innerHeight),
this.printWindow.document.write('<html><body style="margin: 0;">Generating printable document&hellip;</body></html>'),
this.printWindow.document.close(),

But when the window.open() function is called inside a WebView, it just returns a BrowserWindowProxy object to this.printWindow variable. And invoking this.printWindow.document.write() will fail because BrowserWindowProxy provides limited functionality and this.printWindow.document object is undefined.

Fortunately, electron provides also Chrome's built-in window.open() implementation as described here, so regarding the recipe of Teamwork Projects it fixes the problems by adding a property of webpreferences="nativeWindowOpen=yes" to the WebView tag defined at /src/components/services/content/ServiceWebview.js

Hope other services like Gmail, Telegram and Whatsapp will also be fixed by this solution.

koma-private on 18 Nov 2017

@koma-private As you've written correctly in your PR this has the side effect open opening every link with a target="_blank" in Franz and in the browser. Unfortunately I don't have a solution yet.

@eddowding @batmel the issue you are describing is a chrome issue. You need to restart chrome. More infos can be found here: #264

adlk on 18 Nov 2017

possible Duplicate of #264

@BrianGilbert's workaround: right-click and select "Open Link"

haraldox on 15 Jan 2018

👍1

@haraldox
Although I think I should change the title of this issue, I’m talking about some services which have to open a new window and change the content of it automatically by Javascript, here. So your proposal method “right click” doesn’t work.

As for services which won’t work in normal Franz, I applied a small patch described in https://github.com/meetfranz/franz/issues/298 by myself

koma-private on 15 Jan 2018

@adlk
Hi. This is the one of troublesome issues, about that some services need the nativeWindowOpen property in WebView tag to work normally.
I appreciate it if this hack can be activated by some option like “useNativeWindowOpen=true” in the package.json per service because this change has side effects as you know, and I think it’s difficult to modify the current behavior of Franz. What do you think?

P.S. Sorry, I closed https://github.com/meetfranz/franz/pull/298 by my noob mistake, force push :(

koma-private on 15 Jan 2018

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