252306 - new popup notifier causes infinite reload loop on sites that reload on resize

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: General, defect, P2)

Description

[Will Levine]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040719 Firefox/0.9.1+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040719 Firefox/0.9.1+

When a popup is detected, the little panel that says "Firefox prevented this
site ..." drops down. This resizes the area of the web page and triggers a
resize event. If the site is set to reload on resize, this will repeat.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to washingtonpost.com or the sample data: URL
2. Watch
3.
Actual Results:  
Page reloads continuously.

Expected Results:  
Page loads only once.

Comment 1

[José Jeria]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 235871 ***

Comment 2

[Will Levine]

Um... I don't think so. Bug 235871 is a problem with custom theme that has to do
with the progress meter. This is a problem with the default setup that has to do
with the popup panel thing. While the distinction between custom theme vs.
default browser is not really important, this is is a seperate issue because the
code to fix bug 235871 would not fix this problem, so it deserves a different
bug. Also, the powers in charge might choose to resolve this problem in a
different way. For example, they might choose to let the other bug die by
forcing theme authors to change, or they might decide that this is the fault of
washingtonpost.com and not of the browser and so the popup panel is the best
solution to the problem, marking this INVALID. Basically, these problems are
going to be resolved separately, both code-wise and in design. That is why I am
reopening this bug.

Also, I would presume this also applies to pages with reload onresize to install
XPIs as we have a similiar dropdown thing. Or using the find toolbar on a page
with reload onresize.

Comment 3

[Jesse Ruderman]

*** Bug 253741 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[Peter van der Woude [:Peter6]]

*** Bug 254849 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 5

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

Re comment #2.  This is NOT an issue with the find toolbar becauswe the find
toolbar persists when the reload occurs.  The reason this is aproblem with the
popup blocker is that it goes away when the reload is initiated so when the
reload completes the bar reappears and triggers another resize.  The simple
solution is to NOT have the popup blocker bar go away on a server initiated reload.

Comment 6

[Steve Wardell]

Having it not go away on a server initiated reload would still cause an issue
thou the issue would not be loop. The page would reload once when the page goes
from no warning head to adding the popup warning header which I would consider
non-optimal behavior. Some possibilities:

1) Have the top banner not push down the content, but just display on top of it
so the size does not very to javascript. if there's support for it in mozilla,
it could even be transparent to allow the page below to partially show below.
2) Have the banner push down, but have javascript returned size not take the
adjusted size into account

Comment 7

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

re comment #6.  Windows XP SP2 seems to do something akin to option 2.

Comment 8

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

re comment #7.  I oviously meant to say the XP SP2 version of IE.  Sorry for the
bug spam.

Comment 9

[Oliver Saier]

I voted for this bug, can't reproduce it anymore now. Don't know about the trunk
though.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040831
Firefox/0.9.1+

Comment 10

[Steve Wardell]

I glanced through the source of page including most of the includes from
washpost and did not see the window size, if not matching reload, code that I
saw when I first has this issue. So it would seem. Even my test page of a saved
page from washingtonpost.com now does not have problems. Though the js includes
from washingtonpost.com were saved in that instance, the js includes from
doubleclick were and are served live. So it might appear that doubleclick
changed their code to not reload page on a resize? Anyone have another site that
still experiences the behavior?

Comment 11

[Will Levine]

Go to washingtonpost.com and maximize or resize the window. It still reloads.
For some reason though, the popup notifier isn't showing up. This also seems to
be true for the URLs provided in bugs duped to this one.

Comment 12

[Steve Wardell]

Does washpost still do pop-ups? I tried it in IE and didn't see any popups or
warnings of any. Perhaps with IE having pop-up blocking, the sites have backed
off using pop-ups.

Comment 13

[Peter van der Woude [:Peter6]]

(In reply to comment #12)
> Does washpost still do pop-ups? I tried it in IE and didn't see any popups or
> warnings of any. Perhaps with IE having pop-up blocking, the sites have backed
> off using pop-ups.
It appears they stopped with that.
But they still force a pagereload if you resize the window

Comment 14

[Steve Wardell]

Two areas of concern have been brought up in this bug:

1) Popups on sites that reload on resize go into an infinite loop. This no
longer occurs on washingtonpost because it seems they stopped pop-ups. Do we
know sites where this still occurs? It would still seem to be an item to address
in firefox to adjust some behavior such that popup notification and reload on
resize can not cause an infinite loop be restricting the impact the pop-up
notification has on the page's awareness of such notification (which would
include resizing the page).

2) The current behavior of reloading on a resize. I would argue that this is ok
behavior for firefox. There may be situations where a page author wishes to
display things different in certain window sizes, so this is ok Firefox
behavior. Thou, the necessity of this in site design is probably the area which
should be questioned. Does washingtonpost (or it's advertising) really need to
reload on a resize? Probably not, but that's more bad site design.

Comment 15

[Will Levine]

(In reply to comment #14)
> Two areas of concern have been brought up in this bug:
> 
> 1) Popups on sites that reload on resize go into an infinite loop. This no
> longer occurs on washingtonpost because it seems they stopped pop-ups.

No. Washingtonpost.com still has popups. Try turning popup blocking off and
watch. For some reason, the popup notifier does not appear.

> 2) The current behavior of reloading on a resize. I would argue that this is ok
> behavior for firefox. There may be situations where a page author wishes to
> display things different in certain window sizes, so this is ok Firefox
> behavior. Thou, the necessity of this in site design is probably the area which
> should be questioned. Does washingtonpost (or it's advertising) really need to
> reload on a resize? Probably not, but that's more bad site design.

Netscape 4.x had a lot of problems with layout on resize. Because of this many
sites, including washingtonpost.com, force NS4 to reload on resize. However, the
test they use not only detects NS4, but also Gecko and Opera (but not IE).  They
should be using a NS4 specific test (document.layers) for adding the reload
handler or they should drop just NS4 support completely. This is evangelism bug
241165 .

Comment 16

[Oliver Saier]

data:text/html,<body onload="window.open()" onresize="window.history.go(0)">
WFM running the latest trunk build as well, I can only assume that it depends on
some other bug that got fixed recently!

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8a3) Gecko/20040905
Firefox/0.9.1+ (trunk/zip/new profile)

Comment 17

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

Well, I no longer get pop-ups from www.washingtonpost.com, but a few days ago I
still was, and it appeared at that time that inb recent aviary nightlies this
was at least fixed such that the page only repainted once, because the blocked
pop-up notifier bar persisted during the refresh.

Comment 18

[Oliver Saier]

Please use the provided sample data: URL, as it *used* to lead to the infinite
reload loop as well...

Comment 19

[Jesse Ruderman]

See also bug 258917, similar problem with Find bar.

Comment 20

[Peter van der Woude [:Peter6]]

"Needless" to say that plugin finder will do the same

Comment 21

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

With a day-old branch build, Oliver's URL from comment 16 doesn't infinitely
reload for me, but adding an unknown plugin does: data:text/html,<body
onload="window.open()" onresize="location.href=location.href"><embed
type="foo/bar"></body> 

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040923
Firefox/0.10

Comment 22

[Peter van der Woude [:Peter6]]

*** Bug 254170 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 23

[chris]

Firefox 1.0 preview release: webpage repeated reload loops being experienced at
the following Urls

http://news.google.com/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
http://drudgereport.com/
http://www.timespatriot.com/

plus several others I can't relocate in browser history.

Can stop constant reloads with stop button, but page doesn't load completely.

Win2000 OS, 
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10

Comment 24

[Ben Goodger (use ben at mozilla dot org for email)]

Attachment: patch

OK - the second data: url case is the simplest test for this bug because it
causes plugin/popup infobars to fight, causing the window to reload constantly.
They fight because they're different heights, resulting in the window being of
different size constantly. You may see this at washingtonpost.com etc if you
don't have flash or another plugin they use for ads, etc. 

This patch causes the button element on the infobar to be visbility: hidden,
not display: none, forcing all infobars to be the same height. The result is
not the most attractive thing for the popup case but maybe we can fix this
later by making the info button smaller

Comment 25

[foxy]

I've got a strange implication of this bug. When I first came across it, it had
been already fixed, but even with new version of Firefox, new profile and after
wiping out any mentioning of Mozilla Firefox in the regestry I still had it. So
I decided to reinstall Windows XP from clean. After that the bug disappeared.
But to my surprise it reshuffled again on a different account. Basically I have
3 XP User Accounts on my PC. On two of the Firefox works fine, but on one it
still has that annoying bug. Wiping out profile did not help at all.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041011
Firefox/0.10 (JTw) OS WinXP SP2