Comment 4 for bug 481541

Say you already have Firefox open and minimized, and you have it set to open all
links in a new tab (one of the new tab behavior options recently added). I
personally don't want more than one Firefox window running on my system unless I
SPECIFICALLY open another one WITHIN Firefox. So, If I doubleclick on my desktop
shortcut to Firefox, or click on the Quick Launch toolbar link, my prefered
behavior would be to have the minimized Firefox window popup into focus, and
have a new tab opened within it, also in focus, and not have a new Firefox
window opened. My current partial solution is to replace all my Firefox
shortcuts with .url files linked to my homepage. Using this, I can at least get
everything always opened in the same window as tabs. Doing it this way, the
minimized Firefox window WILL pop up into focus, but the new tab still WON'T,
because I don't use the option to "Select tabs opened from links" (because in
any other case, I WOULDN'T want a new tab to steal focus.) By fixing this bug,
it would solve my problem, because the "Select tabs opened from links" option
only applies to me when I use my middle click, as well.

I would actually like to add a more complete alternate solution to the external
link problem that would allow for more configurability. We should make another
"Select tabs" case called "Select tabs opened by external programs", and place
it only in about:config, and on by default. I know you are thinking that there
is no situation where an external program or .url link is clicked on that one
WOULDN'T want focus to shift to this new tab, but take the situation where
someone is using their external program (say a text editor with url support)
RIGHT NEXT to their Firefox window to edit their webpage frames. They may not
want the current page to change by the other clicked links stealing focus in new
tabs, because they are refering back to and from the top page frameset. By
deselecting this option for a session this would save them some time and effort.
 It would later be even more handy if the often talked about "Always on top" and
"Never on top" options are ever added to the Firefox View menu, because then a
user could open external program links in background tabs, while refering the
entire time to the current tab, while never losing focus of the program they are
working in.

Btw, is there an enhancement request for having "Always on top" and a "Never on
top" options in the View menu?

Here is some more external link bugy behavior: When Firefox is minimized,
clicked on .htm files DON'T bring Firefox into focus, but clicked on .url files
DO. Unless they give us options to control Firefox focus situations, case by
case, program by program, filetype by filetype, then ALL external links (.url,
.htm, and other programs) should be handled the same way (which is what this bug
report requests, to by default always bring Firefox into focus, AND bring the
clicked on content into focus when opening external links).