1004916 - Add UI for a "block all popups" non-default option for the popup blocker

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Settings UI, defect)

Description

[Ayan]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:29.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/29.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140421221237

Steps to reproduce:

On random sites, IE popup blocker works much better than FF - which is just plain ineffective


Actual results:

Case in point: http://songspk.name/bollywood-songs-.html

Try the same site in FF with popups disabled - and Windows 7 / IE 11 with Popup blocked and additional option of "block all popups"

FF still allows additional windows to be spawned if a link is clicked while with the above settings, IE works much better

This is also a potential drive - by - downloads issue for in experienced users


Expected results:

FF should have blocked all popups

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

So is this just asking for the additional "block all popups" option?  

We have that in the core, with pretty fine-grained control over when popups are allowed, exactly.  See the dom.popup_allowed_events preference.  This bug sounds like it's just asking for UI for that, which would very much not be a core DOM issue.

I should note that chances are this option would also break things like the search result links on Yahoo search, since they open the page in a separate window from the search results.

Comment 2

[Gingerbread Man]

(In reply to Not doing reviews right now from comment #1)
> See the dom.popup_allowed_events preference.

Bug 964492 — sites can still get past an empty dom.popup_allowed_events preference.

> This bug sounds like it's just asking for UI for that, which would very much not
> be a core DOM issue.

I interpreted this report as Internet Explorer being more efficient at blocking pop-ups, right out of the box. I missed the “option of ‘block all popups’” buried in the Actual Results where it doesn't belong.

> I should note that chances are this option would also break things like the
> search result links on Yahoo search, since they open the page in a separate
> window from the search results.

user_pref("dom.popup_allowed_events", "");
user_pref("browser.link.open_newwindow", 1);
user_pref("browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction", 0);

That still leaves the following, which can be worked around by adding the site to the pop-up blocker exceptions.
Bug 918780 — it also blocks the file picker for uploads, with no way to open it.

Alternatively, the requested feature is provided by add-ons like the following:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/strict-pop-up-blocker/

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

> Bug 964492 — sites can still get past an empty dom.popup_allowed_events preference.

Can't reproduce.  Can you?

> Bug 918780 — it also blocks the file picker for uploads, with no way to open it.

Yeah, that's a problem.  Hard to have it both ways, because sites can abuse the filepicker popup just like they can window popups.

Comment 4

[Jonathan Watt [:jwatt]]

Mass bug change to replace various 'parity' whiteboard flags with the new canonical keywords. (See bug 1443764 comment 13.)