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Tab closes when file downloaded

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When I download a file from a Yahoo email the tab with Yahoo closes. I can reopen the tab by going to History, Recently closed tabs, but I would prefer for the Yahoo tab to remain open.

When I download a file from a Yahoo email the tab with Yahoo closes. I can reopen the tab by going to History, Recently closed tabs, but I would prefer for the Yahoo tab to remain open.

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Are you still experiencing this problem with Yahoo mail closing? This is a copy/paste of my comment in another thread today (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1401782#answer-1558480):

There is something unusual going on, but first, this seems to work normally:

(1) Open a new tab and open your Yahoo Inbox in only that one tab (2) Click the message that has the attachment; it appears in the same tab (3) Hover the image attachment and click the download button and Save the file -- nothing weird happens

If I force Yahoo Mail to display a message in a second tab, and then download an attachment from that message, then I am able to replicate the unwanted behavior. Here are the four ways I tested:

Scenario A: Open Inbox in a second tab or a new window. Either:

  • right-click the yahoo!mail logo and choose Open Link in New Tab
  • right-click the yahoo!mail logo and choose Open Link in New Window

In this scenario, I can open and view a message in the new tab/window without any rude surprises, but if I open a message and download an attachment, then at some point thereafter, the new tab/window is closed.

Scenario B: Open a single message in a second tab or a new window. Either:

  • Shift+right-click the message in the Inbox and click Open Link in New Tab
  • Shift+right-click the message in the Inbox and click Open Link in New Window

Same here: I can view the message without any rude surprises, but if I download an attachment, then at some point thereafter, the new tab/window is closed.

Can you tell whether you have Yahoo mail open in a different tab? If you type or paste %yahoo in the address bar, Firefox should list all the open Yahoo tabs. You could scan the list to see whether there is another mail tab open which may be the master tab that stays open.


How to allow a second Yahoo! Mail tab to stay open?

I'm doubtful that Firefox is deciding to close the tab for its own reasons because (A) there is an inexplicable delay after the download is completed and (B) it doesn't happen on other sites.

But how could Yahoo! control this? Perhaps a script in the page itself is closing the tab when it was launched from another Yahoo tab. To test that, I tried these methods to open the second window/tab in a completely independent way:

  • press Ctrl+T to launch a new tab, type mail.yahoo.com in the address bar and press Enter to load it (Ctrl+clicking a bookmark should also work)
  • press Ctrl+N to launch a new window, type mail.yahoo.com in the address bar and press Enter to load it (Shift+clicking a bookmark should also work)

Neither of those got closed after opening a message and downloading an attachment.

That's what I've discovered so far. It's not satisfactory that Yahoo is allowed to close a tab when it wants to. Normally, scripts in pages were only allowed to close their tab if the tab was launched using a script. Since the links were launched in a second tab/window by me using Firefox's link context menu, I didn't think the page would be allowed to close its tab in that case. Something seems to have changed.