111542 - turn on dom.disable_open_during_load by default

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(SeaMonkey :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Niels Aufbau]

When I mentioned the Pornzilla project on Slashdot, augustz replied:  "Also well
suited to browsing with children beleive it or not. When you mistype a URL 600
hard core porn windows don't pop up in you and your childs face."

When was the last time you were able to make a change to Mozilla that was hailed
as both family-friendly and porn-friendly?

I'll mark this as depending on bug 75371 because it shouldn't be on by default
until a) users can turn it off and b) there has been time for users to test the
feature.

Comment 1

[Zach Lipton [:zach]]

This is not perferences since that only applies to actual problems with the 
back-end prefs code which works just fine. Prefs are stored and retrieved 
correctly. Sending to UID for UE input on this...

Comment 2

[Zach Lipton [:zach]]

reassign

Comment 3

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

Hummmmm. This is a nice idea, but I really don't think we can do it.

At the moment, Mozilla has distributors who want unsolicited windows to be 
allowed by default. (One distributor in particular, Netscape, effectively makes 
them compulsory -- but that *doesn't* affect my argument.) It seems likely that 
distributors are going to continue to behave like that in the future; and as 
long as they do behave like that, Mozilla builds released by the Mozilla 
Organization need to allow unrequested windows by default. If they don't, we're 
not doing our job in giving features reasonable exposure to testing.

That is, we need to allow unrequested windows by default for the same reason 
that we allow any-domain cookies by default. We can be reasonably confident 
that a significant proportion of testers will turn them off, so that both on 
and off settings get exposed to testing; whereas if we had them off by default, 
we could not be confident that a significant proportion of testers would turn 
them on.

That might sound like an argument that every pref should default to the 
opposite of what most users would want, but it's not. It only applies while a 
significant proportion of Mozilla-based browsers are distributed with the pref 
set the opposite of what most users would want. When that is no longer the 
case, *and* when Mozilla-based browsers have at least (say) 50 percent market 
share (too much to block), *and* when the blocking is predictable and reliable 
in allowing requested windows, *then* a new bug could be filed -- not to change 
the default value of the pref, but to abolish the pref and disallow unrequested 
windows completely.

Wontfix.