Note that I confirmed that the behaviour is terrible and custoemrs who use Quickoffice can get into a state which they cant get out of and makes the device almost unusable for that particular web app. I noticed this issue with Salesforce (which is a huge enterprise application) but it could potentially be reproduced by other apps as well.

Requesting help from the Quickoffice eng team to triage this.

b/36605105 filed for internal routing.

The main problem is that a page with <iframe src="foo.docx"> causes the entire tab to navigate to a QuickOffice extension page. Navigating back to the original page just navigates to QuickOffice again, like a redirect.

Simple repro: http://output.jsbin.com/sajihozira

This is very annoying. The Salesforce console I tested with has two features:
1. Shows attachments in <iframe>s
2. Remembers what you were viewing from your last session

which mean that if you get into this loop, you can't easily get out -- logging into Salesforce shows you the attachment in an <iframe> again, which redirects you to the chrome-extension:// page.

This is not a problem with the Salesforce site, but it does surface this bug in a really ugly way.

Assigning to myself while I investigate further.

I'm not sure what the correct behavior here would be. Can we load Quickoffice in an iframe? (Trying that but it doesn't seem to work.) Open Quickoffice in a new tab? Download the .docx?

interactive version for debugging: http://output.jsbin.com/diduzuweda

TL;DR: The mime type handler event includes a tab ID. Quickoffice handles the mime type event by updating the given tab to point to a Quickoffice extension page. Quickoffice should either launch a new window when the event indicates the request was "embedded", or somehow show its extension page in the iframe.

More detail:

Loading a .docx (including in an iframe) triggers the streams_private::OnExecuteMimeTypeHandler event for the registered mime type handler (Quickoffice):

https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/chrome/common/extensions/api/streams_private.idl?type=cs&q=onexecutemimet&l=55

This includes the ID of the tab loading the stream, and a bool indicating whether the stream is embedded.

The Quickoffice background script handles this event by calling chrome.tabs.update for the given tab. This is why the entire tab redirects to the extension URL (provided by Quickoffice). A quick and dirty fix is to update the Quickoffice script to do something else if the |embedded| param is true, like opening a new tab.

For the Salesforce console, this would mean opening the console to the view with the embedded .docx attachment would always pop open a new Quickoffice tab, which is less than ideal.

hlo: Thoughts?

Assigning to hlo@ as with Buganizer bug. Ha, can QO move forward ASAP with the approach to open "embedded" streams in a new tab and let us know how that performs?

Sure - progress so far is that Synerzip have submitted a fix, but are currently testing . will send an update once we have the testing results back. 

FIX is ready at - https://quickoffice-internal-review.googlesource.com/#/c/22570/. Testing didn't find any regressions.

Yay, this landed last night.

@hlo Can you please cut a new quickoffice release ASAP and push that to chrome-internal so we can pull the component extension it into Chrome?

Yep will ask vendor team to kick off making an official release, will take a few days to test and push out to ChromeOS

OK. The sooner the better. Thanks!

This is now fixed in the QO component extension version pulled in via src-internal.

I've requested merges in  issue 728085 .