Ublock: Popup/popunder blocking broken after opening uBO's dashboard through popup panel

Created on 26 Sep 2017 · 8Comments · Source: gorhill/uBlock

First reported here by @kasper93.

This is unrelated to the regression, which was fixed.

This affects all versions of Firefox, including in Nightly.

The repro steps are quite simple (from my end, both with Firefox 55 and Nightly):

Launch browser.
Open popup test page in a new tab.
Verify that the popup from the first test ("direct url tab") is properly blocked.
- uBO's popup blocking depends on webNavigation.onCreatedNavigationTarget to properly set the sourceTabId property.
Open uBO's dashboard (or logger) through uBO's popup panel.
- The issue can't be reproduced if opening the dashboard from uBO's preferences in about:addons.
Go back to the popup test page previously opened above, and repeat the test in 3.

Result: uBO fails to properly filter the popup.

After much investigation, it turns out that the one call to vAPI.closePopup() in vapi-common.js is causing this issue:

window.open('','_self').close();

The issue does not exist with Chromium, with the same code path.

I have no idea why this happens. It appears Firefox's internals are in a bad state after step 4: the sourceTabId from webNavigation.onCreatedNavigationTarget is always -1.

browser bug

Source

gorhill

All 8 comments

Hmm, I'm wondering why you do window.open('','_self').close();? window.close(); works just fine and doesn't break anything in the process. At least for Firefox.

kasper93 on 26 Sep 2017

@kasper93 I don't know, I didn't put this code there: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/commit/b301ac031e0c2e9a99cb6f8953319d44e22f33d2#diff-bc664f26b9c453e0d43a9379e8135c6a.

It didn't occur to me to try window.close(), I assumed there must have been an issue with it as the rationale to use what is currently in there. I will give it a try, and if it works, I will use it just for Firefox until I understand why window.open('','_self').close() was used.

gorhill on 26 Sep 2017

@gorhill: Sure, I just read here https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/user_interface/Popups

The popup can be closed programmatically by calling window.close() from a script running in the popup.

So it seems to be blessed way to close popups. Might be hard to remember why you did this way after all this time. :)

kasper93 on 26 Sep 2017

👍1

@kasper93, you're right, I confirm this works fine. Wish I had seen your comment before pushing rc2.

I removed my comment re "sticky" above to avoid any confusion.

gorhill on 26 Sep 2017

I removed the "browser bug" label, but I do wonder what is occurring internally for Firefox API's webNavigation.onCreatedNavigationTarget to become broken. I wonder if this issue can be triggered by a normal web page.

gorhill on 26 Sep 2017

How can I close a browser window without receiving the “Do you want to close this window” prompt?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57854/how-can-i-close-a-browser-window-without-receiving-the-do-you-want-to-close-thi

gwarser on 26 Sep 2017

👍1

Putting back the "browser bug" label, this simple HTML document will cause webNavigation.onCreatedNavigationTarget to become broken:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<script>
    window.open('','_self').close();
</script>
</body>
</html>

gorhill on 26 Sep 2017

Thanks for the debugging @gorhill and others. I have poked a bit more at it, created a test case and reported the bug at: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1403349