1075187 - Malfunction of Firefox with OSX 10.9.5 parental control

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Jerome Gallinari]

Attachment: Capture d’écran 2014-09-30 à 23.27.41.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_5) AppleWebKit/600.1.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.1 Safari/537.85.10

Steps to reproduce:

1. On OSX 10.9.5, create an account with web parental control activated, checkbox "Try to limit access to adult web sites automatically..." on the Web tabbed window in the Parental Controls dialog.

2. With Firefox, go to http://www.mozilla.org




Actual results:

3. A dialog pops up saying a secured web site is detected by the system and the authorization to add it to the list of known web sites is asked to the user, which can be done only by the administrator. The access to the web site is then forbidden.


Expected results:

The browser should not prevent the user from accessing this kind of web sites, which is obviously not an adult web site.
Safari does it correctly, so that seems to be a Firefox issue. A vast majority of web sites causes the same issue with FF, resulting in the impossibility to browse the web with FF via a controlled account unless the administrator is here to enter his password constantly.

As for me, FF is unusable on OSX with parental control activated, and I regret that.

Comment 2

[Jerome Gallinari]

I totally disagree: like bug 1073134, this one concerns parental control on OSX, but the effects are not similar at all:

 - 1073134: you cannot download anything from FF
 - 1075187: you cannot browse a lot of websites without being popped up with the parental control asking to confirm the site is safe


(In reply to YF (Yang) from comment #1)
> 
> *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 1073134 ***

Comment 3

[YF (Yang)]

I guess the due to the same reason, but maybe not indeed, sorry. I marked it as a see also now.


oops, and I did not notice the both bug is reported by you, forgive me.

Comment 4

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

Frankly this sounds like an Apple bug -- that Apple's parental control software mistakenly thinks that http://www.mozilla.org/ is an adult site.

What happens when you try to visit http://www.mozilla.org/ in Safari, or Chrome, or Opera?

Comment 5

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

This is an Apple bug.  The same thing happens accessing any https:// site in Chrome or Opera.  In all three non-Apple browsers (Firefox, Chrome and Opera) it's possible to work around the problem by adding the problematic websites to the list of known websites ... but of course for this you need an admin account and password.

Comment 6

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

It's odd that the same thing doesn't happen in Safari.  Presumably Apple has provided it with some secret workaround :-(

Comment 7

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

It's not an Apple bug but it's just how the parental control works.
In order to do content filtering to block for example p0rn images in a Forum, the parental control filtering system has to look into the data. In the case of https pages it can not do that because the content is encrypted.
That is the reason why you have to allow every single https page. This makes the web more and more unusable for any third party application because the web moves forward to encrypted connections.

You might ask why it doesn't happen with Safari. The answer is that Safari seems to decrypt the incoming data and sends the data to the parental filtering.

Unless Apple provides an API for the parental control, we and any other browser vendor can not change the current situation.

Comment 8

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

The behavior outside of Safari is still at least an Apple design flaw.  Having to find an admin to approve every single https:// connection makes the "Try to limit access to adult web sites automatically..." setting basically unusable outside of Safari.

But in other respects, Matti, your explanation is much better than mine -- more precise, and very likely to be true.

Comment 9

[Stephen A Pohl [:spohl]]

Huh..? Status got reset just because I cc'd myself to this bug and now I can't close it as verified anymore.

Comment 10

[Stephen A Pohl [:spohl]]

I guess I need to set the status to RESOLVED first before I can set it to VERIFIED.