I noticed something really peculiar this morning when I was invited to a Zoom meeting. I had uninstalled Zoom the night before but when I clicked the Join Meeting link, I was still prompted by the browser to open the zoom.us application. I went ahead and clicked OK to open it and I got the OSX popup: "You're opening the application "zoom.us" for the first time. Are you sure you want to open this application?" (<a href="https://imgur.com/nsOV3d5" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/nsOV3d5</a>)<p>I checked my Applications folder and didn't see Zoom there so I clicked the "Show Application" button in the popup and it ended up opening the Applications folder from one of my Time Machine backups with Zoom installed.<p>I tested this with both Firefox and Chrome with the same results. Now I don't know if this is an OSX specific issue, a browser issue, or a Zoom issue.<p>Can anyone else confirm the same or similar behavior on Mac? If anyone can also shed some insight about this behavior, it would be much appreciated.
This sounds like it might be a bug/misconfiguration in Launch Services, which deals things like application registration and URL scheme handling. Since I would expect your browser to do something like call to the system to open the URL (LSOpenURLsWithRole, et al.) I don't think this is a problem with Zoom.
It's doubtful that this is Zoom doing anything in particular.<p>Rather it's likely the OS doing the best it can to handle the URL for you. The OS has a mapping between the URL and the bundle identifier of the app, and apparently looked for the bundle on a disk that happened to be attached, after it didn't find it on your main disk. Which is perfectly reasonable in itself.
Open a bug with Apple about this. They fixed an issue I reported a few years back about being able to launch applications in the Trash. They will likely want to add the same restriction to Time Machine Backups as well.
It'll do that with any application on the Mac, this is not peculiar to Zoom. The Time Machine backup is, as far as the Finder is concerned, just another volume. It'll prefer applications on the root volume, but it'll launch them from other volumes as well.
I wasn't aware that any non-OS service even had access to data and applications saved in Time Machine. This might be worthy of a bug bounty report to Apple.
On a current version of OS X you should be getting something that looks like this on attempts to launch an app from a backup:<p><a href="https://i.imgur.com/eHlkGt0.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/eHlkGt0.png</a>
It sounds like a (Mac OS|OSX) issue, because why is it looking for URL handlers in its backups?<p>You could test it with Slack, they also use the same way ("tell the browser to load a URL") to load their app from the browser.
Sort of sidetracking, but: afaik applications open from a browser via a custom protocol in a link, and for that the application has to be already installed—unless MacOS offers to search the app store (if it does, not sure). So, this suggests to me that either MacOS leaves protocol associations in place after uninstalling an app, and has the machinery to resurrect such an app from the backups, or Zoom leaves around a protocol-handling app after an uninstall.
I wish I could remember / find it right now, maybe it was my Witopia VPN? Need to check...<p>Anyway, I've had at least one application that said to remove it, first delete it, AND THEN EMPTY THE TRASH (?!?!) and maybe even reboot. Most of us are probably more troubled by the trash-empty thing than the reboot thing.<p>EDIT: OK Alzheimer's hasn't gotten me yet. It was Witopia / personalVPN:<p><a href="https://www.personalvpn.com/support/set-vpn-mac/app-setup-for-macos-10.14" rel="nofollow">https://www.personalvpn.com/support/set-vpn-mac/app-setup-fo...</a><p>Just search the page for the word "empty". It reads:<p>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~<p>2. If you already had the WiTopia personalVPN app installed previously: Go to your FINDER > Applications folder > Drag the WiTopia app from there to the trash > and empty the trash* to remove the existing app.<p>* If the trash is not emptied, this will not work!<p>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I guess in some sense it is the price one pays for "it just works". The main problem I have is this seems like going to very far extremes in order to run the app no matter what and the tradeoffs were never discussed or put in front of people, which I find to be pretty unethical. Sort of like the privacy debate - the tradeoffs of everyone sharing their personal data were never really up for debate.
If your time machine backup volume was mounted, I would expect this behavior. Back in the old days, when storage was at a premium, you could have applications stored on a network volume, so they would be shared by everyone on the LAN. The OS would launch an application that matched the requested file type from any mounted volume.<p>If it wasn't mounted, I would file a bug.<p>Either way, not really Zoom's fault.
another plug for the zoom redirect plugin <a href="https://github.com/arkadiyt/zoom-redirector" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/arkadiyt/zoom-redirector</a>