204290 - Patch: pref to prevent accidental following of links of blocked images

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Settings UI, enhancement)

Description

[eric lindvall]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030422 Mozilla Firebird/0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030422 Mozilla Firebird/0.6

I have created a patch (that will be included) to ignore clicks on links for
images which have been selected as "Block images from server".

The feature can be enabled with:
user_pref("imageblocker.disable_links", true);


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[eric lindvall]

Attachment: Patch to ignore clicks on blocked images

This patch should ignore clicks to "blocked" images if the preference is set.

Comment 2

[David P James]

I'm sort of curious as to what this is actually going to accomplish... if one
has blocked images from a specific server then why would one then go and try to
click on that image? And then of course, why bother making a patch to prevent
something doing just that?

Before we confirm this for review, I'd like to know the rationale behind this
patch. I don't wish to discourage patch-making; I'm just curious as to the
rationale.

Comment 3

[eric lindvall]

There have been others who may have described this better, but for me, when i am
browsing in a multi-window setup, i will many times click on any blank spot on
the page to get focus back for a window.

cnn.com is the perfect example of this, where they have ads on the right hand
side of the page, and when you disable the ad images, the right side of the page
is white. so if i have another window in the foreground, and i click on the cnn
window, the page automatically goes to the ad url that i didn't even know was there.

Comment 4

[David P James]

Thank you. So this is basically to create a pref to prevent the accidental
following of links in blocked images if I understand it correctly.

-->Changing summary
Component --> Preferences
Status -->Confirming as an enhancement request

Comment 5

[eric lindvall]

That is correct.

Comment 6

[David Tenser [:djst]]

> That is correct.
Eric, you just reversed David's changes while saying they're correct.

Anyway, if I understand this correctly, you want a pref for this to be added to
the Options window? If so, then I'm strongly against this bug. This would almost
be a pref that wouldn't have a place in the Mozilla Preferences window, much
less in the Mozilla Firebird Options window.

Even if you don't want a pref to be added, I think this should not be changed
anyway. I don't expect links to stop working because I don't want images to load.

Recommend WONTFIX. 

Comment 7

[eric lindvall]

Excuse me, I didn't mean that there should be something in the GUI to
enable/disable this option. Now as I re-read what he said, I see that is what he
meant.

I'm not sure what changes I reversed, but apologize if I was clumsy and reverted
some changes in bugzilla.

All I am proposing is a feature that can be enabled via prefs.js/user.js.

I guess my point of making it an option that can be turned on an off is
specifically because there will be some people (like you), who wouldn't expect
that to happen, and others (like me, and some people who responded to my post in
the firebird feature forum) who find the fact that it doesn't happen, annoying
at times.

Making it an option that defaults to being off makes it so that the default
behaviour doesn't change, but if people decide they would like to not have links
followed for images they've blocked, they can choose to do so.

Comment 8

[David P James]

Actually, I was going to leave it to the discretion of the devs, but personally
I don't think it belongs in the Options dialog either and would only be
accessible through about:config or user.js. About the only place I could see it
going is in the images manager (when you click on Permissions) on a new tab in
that manager.

As for changes, this is an enhancement request, not a bug. There is nothing
"buggy" about Firebird's behaviour with respect to this report. And the
component is Preferences, not General (Preferences: "Bugs and feature requests
for [Firebird] preferences. This includes the preferences manager as well as the
preferences defaults"). Enhancement, by the way, does not mean "less important
than trivial". Importance is measured by Priority, not Severity (and no Phx/FB
bug I've ever seen has a Priority rating)

Comment 9

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

taking QA contact, sorry about the bugspam

Comment 10

[home]

Perhaps instead of blocking links from all blocked images, it would make more
sense to frame the missing image (or perhaps shade it) to make it stand out
(much like the Flash-click-to-download extension).

I see the problem here as being not the fact that invisible images have active
links, but more that there is no way of telling that such a link is present at
all - I too have had the irritating problem of accidentally following a link I
didn't know was there when shifting focus back to the browser.

Comment 11

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

*** Bug 226079 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 12

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

bug 98554?

Comment 13

[eric lindvall]

Sounds like the same problem.. only the patch does make firefox ignore the click.

Comment 14

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

This discussion can continue for a while longer ;-) 

Comment 15

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

sorry for bugspam, long-overdue mass reassign of ancient QA contact bugs,
filter on "beltznerLovesGoats" to get rid of this mass change

Comment 16

[Shane Killian]

This behavior has annoyed me for quite awhile. I'd certainly like to see this included in a future FireFox release.

Comment 17

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Not going to add this functionality to Firefox.