I've added a gnashrc-driven version for now.
Will not fix the "opens in new tab" or "opens in new window" problem, nor it will support named targets for opening the url...
Anyway fixes the bug as expressed in the summary.

I think if it can be done without javascript, it should. Flash itself doesn't require javascript, and some people may prefer to leave it off. Unless that's the way it's actually done, in which case there's not much choice.

The nsplugin api uses a method for streaming data between processes (from the plugin to gnash's stdin). If a similar stream can be done from gnash's stdout that the plugin listens for (leaving stderr for the normal/verbose output), that could get commands through too. KDE's KProcess has methods for listening to its process's stdout, while the nsplugin should be fine with pipe, dup2, select, and read.

We could try DBus. KDE3 uses DCOP, but KDE4 and and most others are moving/have moved to DBus, so it's likely to be available I think, even on KDE3 systems. Have the nsplugin/kbrowserextension register a dbus destination, add an option to gnash to pass the id through, and use dbus to tell the plugin to open the url in a given target. When the plugin closes, remove the destination.

I can't say I know how to use DBus, though.

As for task #5919, I think the best solution would be to call back into the controlling plugin (either the nsplugin or kpart) and have it call the appropriate browser to open the url with the given target. KDE should have an API for dealing with it itself, and I think the nsplugin API has methods to handle it (adobe's flash plugin uses the nsapi and Just Works on various browsers without setup, afaik).

In the case of no controlling plugin (ie. run from the stand-alone player), we may just need to call xdg-open with the URL.

following up here from 21175 though this is kde related while my problem is more general:

gnash insists on calling firefox all the time along with the ugly -remote openurl syntax...

With the browser I'm using:
kazehakase I don't need to pass any -remote or such... It'll simply open it when called directly via:
kazehakase $URL

The browser is gecko based so I don't see why gnash couldn't be calling something internal or some such...

As I'm understanding it, flash files can open a url in a specific window (the current one, a new one, a named one it opened previously), which will almost certainly need system/browser specific methods.

xdg-open should be fine for a quick solution, however I think you need to take care for if it tries to open a link in the existing window. If a flash happens to run in a loop trying to open a url in the current window, it'd end up spawning window after window. In such a case, I think Gnash would need to abort (which, if it had loaded a url in the current window, it'd end the process anyway).

The default browser can be set via going to K->Control Center->KDE Components->Component Chooser, then highlighting Web Browser. For a KDE app, as kde-gnash is/should be, this setting should be considered the system/user default browser.

For other protocols, I don't know. I'd imagine sending it to the system-defined handler for that type, too. In KDE's Control Center you can see what they are under KDE Components->File Associations and expanding 'uri'.

Under KDE, the command to run is:
kfmclient exec <URL>
which will open a given URL/file using the correct handler set in the Control Center. Windows can do similar with it's start command.

Going the Freedesktop.org psudeo-standard route, the command:
xdg-open <URL>
appears to do the same thing, and appears to honor my KDE settings (in fact, it seems to call kmfclient on my system). Though the man page says it only supports "file, ftp, http and https URLs". So others like rtsp and mms may not work on all systems, even if there's a registered handler.

Gnash appears to always try to open links using Firefox. While that may be a safe assumption for GTK apps, it really isn't for KDE.

KDE has a setting for a default web browser (which may or may not be set to konqueror), and it would be nice if kde-gnash could call that, instead of assuming firefox.. which incidentally isn't installed on my system, but I can only imagine the annoyance if a flash embedded in a web page using konqueror opens firefox for its links, and vice versa.

From what I can tell, this is the kind of thing that would be a GUI player handler (eg. Player::openUrl), so gtk-gnash would use whatever GTK uses, and kde-gnash would use the KDE player to call what KDE has set. It seems, however, that the browser is called from SWFHandlers::CommonGetUrl in server/vm/ASHandlers.cpp, where there's no direct access to a GUI player object.