1398782 - Infinite loop when opening file with spaces in URL on Polarion Lifecycle Management App

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Networking, defect)

Description

[mozfan]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:55.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/55.0
Build ID: 20170824053622

Steps to reproduce:

Open any URL with space (not %20) in it.

For example
https://****.com/***/requests?query=NOT HAS_VALUE:resolution




Actual results:

Browser tab gets in infinite loop of refreshing itself.


Expected results:

Page should be loaded only once.

Bug existed in Firefox v41 and older. It was fixed by entering about:config property:
dom.url.getters_decode_hash=true 

From Firefox v55 this property does not help anymore. It seems that it is ignored, neither "false" nor "true" value solves the issue.

Old bug report:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1271619

Comment 1

[Valentin Gosu [:valentin]]

(In reply to mozfan from comment #0)
> Open any URL with space (not %20) in it.
> 
> For example
> https://****.com/***/requests?query=NOT HAS_VALUE:resolution

I tried the following URL
> https://example.com/?query=NOT HAS_VALUE:resolution

It worked for me.
Can you provide a specific URL that presents this issue?

> From Firefox v55 this property does not help anymore. It seems that it is
> ignored, neither "false" nor "true" value solves the issue.

Indeed, that pref was removed. This was not a real fix.

> Old bug report:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1271619

This is actually a bug with JBoss. From the bug report I take it that it has been fixed.

Comment 2

[mozfan]

I encounter this problem when using Polarion App Lifecycle Management.

See screenshot - any URL with spaces will not work:

https://i.imgur.com/iPpdRWQ.png

However, I think that not really the whole browser tab enters the infinite refresh loop, but only specific element or frame inside the page. In the case of screenshot, that was the "frame" (part of the page) right from the greyed sidebar with "polarion" logo - the part with "Save", "Save and Close" and other buttons and the text "This page has no content yet".  It reloads infinitely while the grey sidebar stays intact, but I cannot click any link on the page to get out of the infinite loop.

Comment 3

[mozfan]

(In reply to mozfan from comment #2)
> I encounter this problem when using Polarion App Lifecycle Management.
> 
> See screenshot - any URL with spaces will not work:
> 
> https://i.imgur.com/iPpdRWQ.png
> 
> However, I think that not really the whole browser tab enters the infinite
> refresh loop, but only specific element or frame inside the page. In the
> case of screenshot, that was the "frame" (part of the page) right from the
> greyed sidebar with "polarion" logo - the part with "Save", "Save and Close"
> and other buttons and the text "This page has no content yet".  It reloads
> infinitely while the grey sidebar stays intact, but I cannot click any link
> on the page to get out of the infinite loop.

Just to clarify: this problem does not occur in any versions of Internet Explorer or Chrome.

Comment 4

[Valentin Gosu [:valentin]]

(In reply to mozfan from comment #3)
> Just to clarify: this problem does not occur in any versions of Internet
> Explorer or Chrome.

Can you also check with Safari?

Comment 5

[--]

I don't see any clear evidence that this problem is actually because of the space in the URL. Yes there's a space in the URL when the user sees a problem, but what makes us believe the two facts are related?

Does it happen on *all* URLs you try that uses spaces? If not, does it happen on more than one URL with spaces and if so, can you please show us some examples (possibly with the host names replaced with example.org or similar) ?

Comment 6

[mozfan]

It is the old problem revisited. When about:config property "dom.url.getters_decode_hash" was ignored in version 55, the sites stopped working again.

It happens on all space containing URLs on the domain that has Polarion Application Life Cycle Management software installed, but I do not know of any other site that has the same problem.

A bug report from the times of FF version 41: https://serverfault.com/questions/733272/urls-that-contains-whitespace-makes-weird-newer-ending-loops-in-polarion-alm/740179

Comment 7

[--]

The previous bug was fixed server-side and here we see the problem again trigger on a single site and not generically with spaces in URLs. I suppose this is not a public URL that we can point our browsers at?

Comment 8

[--]

Valentin, did you figure out what that removed pref actually made Firefox do that could explain why this site no longer plays nice?

Comment 9

[Valentin Gosu [:valentin]]

The removed pref reverted to not percent encoding characters in the hash. It was removed, as flipping it could have actually caused security issues, no major breakage was reported for over a year, and all browsers are considering adopting this behaviour:
https://github.com/whatwg/url/issues/344

Given the link in comment 0, this fix has landed in JBoss (presumably in Polarion too). Now it's up to companies to update their deployment.