1296636 - Bookmarklets don't work

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox for iOS :: Home screen, defect, P1)

Description

[Nathan Demick]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.11; rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0
Build ID: 20160818004001

Steps to reproduce:

Attempted to run a simple bookmarklet that I created using my desktop Firefox client: `(function(){document.body.style.background='green';})()`


Actual results:

`javascript:`-prefixed string was sent as a query to my preferred search engine.


Expected results:

Javascript should have been executed in the current page context.

Comment 1

[Catalin Suciu [:csuciu]]

JavaScript cannot be run in Safari either. The difference is that Safari is displaying a warning message saying 'Cannot Run Script' while Firefox is sending 'javascript:;' to the default search engine. 

Stephan is there anything we can do here?

Comment 2

[Stephan Leroux [:sleroux]]

I've used bookmarklets on Safari for iOS for saving items to Pocket on iOS 7 so I'm not sure if Safari has removed the functionality or not but I doubt it. We should probably be able to support bookmarklets as well. From my understanding of the code, this might not be a bug necessarily but missing functionality. I'll throw this in our nomination list so we can start a conversation about it in the upcoming triage meeting.

Comment 3

[Stephan Leroux [:sleroux]]

Tracked in AHA-230

Comment 4

[Robin Whittleton]

Bookmarklets definitely work on Safari, but just search for the contents on Firefox. I use the ‘Post to HN’ bookmarklet at https://news.ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html regularly on Safari and would love to use it on Firefox too.

Comment 6

[dom.gregori]

Chrome on iOS was able to run javascript via the URL bar and Safari is able to as well. Is this something that can be fixed?

Comment 7

[Robin Whittleton]

No-one’s working on this but it’s a valid bug that actively impedes my use of Fxvon iOS every day. Can someone reopen it?

Comment 8

[Justin D'Arcangelo [:justindarc]]

Re-opening for consideration.

Comment 9

[mesalasnano]

(In reply to Robin Whittleton from comment #7)

No-one’s working on this but it’s a valid bug that actively impedes my use of Fxvon iOS every day. Can someone reopen it?

I can second that. It’s a daily problem for me.

Comment 10

[dom.gregori]

+1 on this too. It's the only thing keeping me from switching over to Firefox.

Comment 11

[Justin D'Arcangelo [:justindarc]]

Landed on master:

https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/commit/9cc052f5df1099e54a56799ee43d429d9c13e0ce

Comment 12

[Martijn Pieters]

This appears to have regressed. Bookmarklets in F-for-iOS 19 are opening as search again.

Comment 13

[:garvan]

I put up a PR to fix the only problem I found which was that quotes were being replaced with fancy quotes: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/pull/5486

You can verify javascript: is currently working otherwise by doing javascript:alert()

Comment 14

[Martijn Pieters]

Right, I figured out what is wrong with the bookmark, and it's down to URL quoting, see below.

You can verify javascript: is currently working otherwise by doing javascript:alert()

The bookmark editor in FF iOS does not actually let you create such a bookmark, so testing was hampered (create a new bookmark, and you'll be given a URL-specific keyboard and URLs that start with javascript: are not accepted as the Save action remains disabled). I had previously used an existing JS bookmark that indeed uses quotes but was created on the desktop. A plain javascript:alert() bookmark created on the desktop then synched to iOS indeed works.

The following bookmark is opened as a search, however:

javascript:(function(){var a=Array.from(document.querySelectorAll("a[href$='.jpg']"), l => l.getAttribute('href'));a.sort();for(var i=0;i<a.length;i++){window.open(a[i]);}})()

This bookmark is designed to find all JPEG links and opens these in separate tabs (warning: popup blockers won't like this one, especially when there are many such images). The bookmark works fine on the desktop, is synched to iOS, then fails to work as expected on iOS FF.

I traced this to URL quoting; the above uses spaces and plenty of non-URL-safe characters. Here is the quoted version:

javascript:%28function%28%29%7Bvar%20a%3DArray.from%28document.querySelectorAll%28%22a%5Bhref%24%3D%27.jpg%27%5D%22%29%2C%20l%20%3D%3E%20l.getAttribute%28%27href%27%29%29%3Ba.sort%28%29%3Bfor%28var%20i%3D0%3Bi%3Ca.length%3Bi%2B%2B%29%7Bwindow.open%28a%5Bi%5D%29%3B%7D%7D%29%28%29

That one does work properly.

I appreciate the difference, I forgot entirely that as a URL you need to quote the non-URL-safe characters. Clearly, desktop FF doesn't care and handles quoting for us. The unexpected behaviour on iOS in this case is more that it is treated as a search, instead.

Should this be treated as a bug, and if so, should this be a separate, new ticket? Should the desktop behaviour be how iOS FF handles such bookmarks?

Comment 15

[lohfu]

this pains me every day... however i seem to be getting different results, namely absolutely nothing happens when i click on bookmarklets. no search, nothing. not even javascript:alert() seems to work in for me. everything works fine in safari.

iPhone 6S
iOS: 13.3
Firefox 21.0 (16918)

this bug is making me consider switching back to chrome :o(

Comment 16

[lohfu]

(In reply to Martijn Pieters from comment #14)

Should this be treated as a bug, and if so, should this be a separate, new ticket? Should the desktop behaviour be how iOS FF handles such bookmarks?

this should definitely be treated as a bug. bookmarklets work in all other iOS browsers i have tried (chrome and safari) as well as all desktop browsers. to me, and i bet many others, it is a very important feature.

Comment 17

[Simon Basca [:SimonB]]

This issue is being tracked here: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/issues/5626. Thank you for your feedback.