I am cutting and pasting the reply I got from Microsoft today. They definitely acknowledge it as a bug, but they seem to be implying it is something that they may or may not fix. Please read over his reply and give me any direction you can on how to proceed. I already replied and told him that neither "workaround" he lists is valid for us. Based on previous discussions, it sounds like roundcube intends to maintain a real <a> tag pointing to a real URL.

Hi Joel,
The DIV case is really a different scenario.  It does not have any special meaning when Ctrl + Click so that should be consistent with what you see in IE6.  IE7 added a special case for Anchor tag handling when Ctrl + Click.  I am currently working on this issue with my escalation engineer, Shahinur.  You raise a valid point about the onclick event should be fired for Ctrl + Click regardless of which window the navigation happens in.  At this point this does look like a bug in IE7.  I don’t see any good workaround for this problem.  There are a few ideas that that you may have already knew or touched on at some point:

 

1)       Try avoid using the Anchor tag, you can use other elements like DIV (you already knew) or SPAN tag and still mimic the Anchor tag appearance.  Some thing like this:

 

<span style="text-decoration: underline; cursor:hand; color:blue" onclick="aFunction()" >
click this "link"
</span>.

 

2)       It seems that if the Anchor tag does not have a valid href URL attribute.  If the href attribute is set to “” (empty string) or “#” or even non-existant then things are working as expected.  Below is an example of the href missing:

 

If these workarounds do not work for you, we can request a hotfix from the product team.  Keep in mind that there is always a chance that the hotfix request can be rejected.  If you diecide to pursue this route, I would need to have a Business Impact statement from you addressing the following questions.  Once I have the Business Impact Statement, I can file a formal hotfix request to the product team:

 

1.  Business Impact
                - How does this bug affect your business
                - Why are current workarounds, if any, unacceptable
2.  Financial Impact (include how it was calculated)
                - What is the financial impact of the bug
                - What is the financial impact of the best workaround, if any
3.  Problem's frequency and probability?
4.  Number of companies impacted
5.  Number of corporate  desktops and servers impacted
6.  Number of consumer desktops (ie. home users) impacted
7.  What IE platform is the hot fix needed?
      - IE 6.0 sp2 on XP SP2
      - IE 6.0 on Windows 2003 Server
      - IE 6.0 on Windows 2003 Server SP1
      - IE 7.0 on Vista
      - IE 7.0 on XP SP2
      - IE 7.0 on Windows 2003 Server SP1
9.  What type of hot fix package do you need?
                QFE – This package takes about 1-2 months to release and has a strict  acceptance criteria.  It is only distributed to customers by contacting Microsoft Support referencing a KB article.  It is also redistributable only within a corporation (but not to the corporation’s customers).  The fix is usually enabled by setting a specific registry key on the machine.
                GDR – This package takes about 3-6 months to release and is subjected to more testing and an even higher acceptance criteria.  It is distributed to customers by downloading it from a public Microsoft link.  This package is normally not available if a QFE meets your needs.
8.  What languages (English, Chineses,...) are needed?

Joel Clermont
joel@orionweb.net
262-377-9930