1424553 - No warning and reopen option when a popup is blocked inside a web extension's popup

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(WebExtensions :: Frontend, defect, P5)

Description

[Blaise Kal]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.13; rv:58.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/58.0
Build ID: 20171207170405

Steps to reproduce:

1. Disable "browserSettings.allowPopupsForUserEvents"
2. Create a web extension with browser_action.default_popup "popup.html" with contents: <button onclick="window.open('https://example.org/')>POP</button>
3. Click the web extension icon in the toolbar to open the popup
4. Click the POP button in the popup

Step 1 can be done by installing *and* enabling https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/strict-pop-up-blocker/

Step 2/3/4 can be done by installing Live Reload which attempts to open a popup when you click "Create a new reload rule". URL: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/live-reload/versions/?page=1#version-1.2.1 (don't install a later version, will have a workaround)


Actual results:

Nothing


Expected results:

Option 1: The yellow warning message that shows that a popup was blocked

Option 2: The popup was opened because allowPopupsForUserEvents is ignored in web extensions

Comment 1

[Paul Oiegas [:poiegas], PM for Ecosystem QA (OMC, New Tab, Contextual, Nimbus, Experiments), Services QA (VPN, FxA/Subplat, Relay, Monitor), WebCompat QA, and Solo QA teams), TestRail admin, etc]

Since I don't have the knowledge to create a webextension as mentioned in the bug, I'm moving this to a more appropriate component to get a developer opinion on it.

Comment 2

[CosminB]

Attachment: Bug1424553.gif

I can reproduce this issue on Firefox 57.0.2(20171206182557),58.0b11(20171211020921) and Firefox 59.0a1(20171213220121) under Win 7 64-bit and Mac OS X 10.13.1

The pop-up is opened as presented in Option 2.

Please see the attached video.

Comment 3

[Blaise Kal]

I just figured out that this issue can be easily mitigated by using "browser.windows.create" instead of "window.open".

Comment 4

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

Clearing design-decision-needed since there's no API design question here.

Ordinarily you would see the yellow notification bar here in the window that tried to create the popup.  But since you tried to create the popup from another popup window that has been dismissed, there's nowhere for it to go.
As you note, extensions that want to manage windows without the restrictions of the DOM API can just use browser.windows.