Got it. When we did a window.open, the file we mapped to was *.xhtml; when we changed this to *.jsf, it worked. In the web.xml, we had configured for the URL
pattern *.jsf . We also had an entry for xhtml just that faces
servlet was not called and hence no JSF components were displayed. So *.xhtml will work if it is forward from one page, but not during a window.open .