New tabs say "about:blank" until loaded (window.opener issue in renderer)

[bsclifton]

Did you search for similar issues before submitting this one?
Yes

Describe the issue you encountered:
Opening anything in a new tab (middle click on links, etc) shows "about:blank" for about two seconds until the page loads and then finally updates to what it should be.

Expected behavior:
The tab should set the title to the URL being opened (until the title is loaded). This would be consistent with other browsers.

• Platform (Win7, 8, 10? macOS? Linux distro?):
  macOS

• Brave Version (revision SHA):
  0.13.0 preview 7

• Steps to reproduce:

  1. Go to Brave.com
  2. Middle click or cmd+click on "faster" at the top
  3. Notice that it says "about:blank" until loaded in the new tab
  4. Close new tab go back to Brave.com
  5. Right click "faster" and pick "Open in new tab"
  6. Notice it works as expected; defaults to title as URL, then loads title when page loaded

• Screenshot if needed:

• Any related issues:

[bsclifton]

Added to 0.13.0 after dogfooding this for a while and having it be bad enough ☹️ If not critical, we can move back of course

@bridiver is this one you can check out? I know these codepaths were all ones that were recently updated

[bbondy]

@bsclifton is this present in 0.12.15 as well?

[bsclifton]

@bbondy no, it's not; this is new behavior (just confirmed right now, to make 100% sure)

[luixxiul]

@bsclifton do you think this is related or similar in some way with #6453?

[bbondy]

@bsclifton could you confirm what I see?

• In both .12.15 and .13 they load in the same amount of time
• In .12.15 it used to show the url of the page first
• In .13 it shows about:blank instead of the URL of the page first.

[diracdeltas]

On OS X 0.13, I only see this bug if I cmd-click to open in a new tab. If I right click to open in a new tab from the context menu, it doesn't seem to happen

[bsclifton]

@bbondy that is 100% correct on all 3 points; I tested again right now to verify behavior.

The 0.13 build can "feel" longer (because no url or title shows up), but it's roughly the same. Like @diracdeltas mentions, it only happens with cmd+click (or in my case, middle click)

[bsclifton]

@luixxiul yes- I think that #6453 may be the same issue. Do you actually see a time difference in page load from 0.12.15? or does it just appear to be laggy (because you don't see any result until page is loaded)? If it just seems longer, I'd close that in favor of this issue

[bbondy]

this seems to be the same as what Chrome does but in the new tab Chrome displays untitled instead of about:blank, how does that sound as a fix here?

[diracdeltas]

+1 for 'untitled' as the provisional title.

[bsclifton]

also +1 for untitled 😄

[bridiver]

this will happen for all renderer initiated navigations and that includes cmd-click. It happens because the renderer controls the actual navigation to the url and that doesn't happen until the webview is attached and we allow the webcontents to resume loading. In the past we displayed the delayedLoadUrl, but I believe @diracdeltas removed that because of a spoofing vulnerability