1466682 - New Air Mozilla (onlineexperiences.com) "Live Stream" URLs (e.g. for Monday meetings & MoFo town hall) trigger Firefox's popup blocker then drop me back to AirMo front page when I acknowledge the notification

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Air Mozilla :: Other, defect)

Description

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

STR:
 0. Start with a fresh Firefox profile (optional but best for consistent results).

 1. Visit the URL that was sent out to the all-moco list earlier today, for the "MoFo Pre-All Hands" live stream on the new Air Mozilla.

(The URL starts with https://onlinexperiences.com/Launch/Event.htm -- I won't provide the full URL here in case there's any non-public discussion in the to-be-aired livestream.)

 2. Log in, if prompted.

ACTUAL RESULTS:
After all the disconcerting redirects (see bug 1441986), I do not see the livestream page. Instead, the following happens:
 - Firefox displays a yellow "blocked a popup" dropdown.
 - The page *also* pops up an alert saying "It appears that a popup blocker has disabled this function. Please ensure that your popup blockers have been turned off or that the event has been whitelisted. For more information, click on the Help button or visit the help space in the event."
 - If I do the obvious thing and click "OK", I'm redirected back to the AirMo front page, where I don't see any way to get to the livestream I was trying to view.  Also, since I was redirected away, the yellow firefox dropdown (which normally would let me view the popup) disappears, so I'm no longer able to opt-in to showing the popup.

EXPECTED RESULTS:
AirMo should work gracefully with our popup blocker -- either not trigger it, or it should have graceful fallback when it does trigger it. This graceful fallback should give me an easy way to try again to view the livestream.

Comment 1

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Attachment: screenshot of the page I land on when I try to visit the livestream URL

Comment 2

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Andy posted some thoughts about the popup stuff over in bug 1441986 comment 8 -- I'm replying over here:

(In reply to Andy Kochendorfer from bug 1441986 comment #8)
> If you are referring to the Town Hall MoFo OKR 2018, then the link that you
> should have been given to the webcast scheduled for tomorrow is
> https://onlinexperiences.com/Launch/Event.htm?ShowKey=44908&DisplayItem=E267125.

That's the same URL I received via email, yeah.  I confirmed again that this ^ link does trigger this issue, on my machine at least.

> The webcast is unavailable until 10 min. prior to the
> scheduled start time. Only a lobby page will be visible. At 10 min. prior to
> the scheduled start time, the webcast console will be available with a
> holding graphic in the video player until the webcast begins.

That's fine, but the problem is: when I click "OK" on the alert that this link triggers (in default-configured Firefox), I end up getting *bounced away*, to the AirMo front page -- not to the lobby that you mentioned, and not to any page that lets me try to trigger the popup again.  Also, the browser "Back" button doesn't get me to any page that lets me retry.

> Allowing onlinexperiences.com to open a new tab is a requirement of the
> webcasting platform. Please allow and remember this browser setting.

I'm not going to do that, and we should not be encouraging people to globally turn off popup blocking. Blocking popups *in general* (the default Firefox behavior) is a good practice for security & sanity.

Firefox does allow per-domain whitelisting for popups, which happens via that yellow dropdown shown in the screenshot here -- and users should probably be allowing popups *just for this domain* via that UI.  But unfortunately, if I do the obvious thing and click "OK" on the prominent alert popup in the dialog, Firefox's yellow dropdown bar disappears, because the page redirects away to the front page.  And that redirect makes Firefox's helpful popup-allowing UI disappear.

*This* is the usability issue I'm talking about here.

(FWIW, if I visit this page in Chrome, I get the same experience. So this isn't Firefox-specific.)

My "Ask" here is that we [or rather, the vendor?] should not do this redirecting when the user clicks "OK".  They should keep you at the same page so that you can selectively allow popups from this domain (via the browser's helpful UI) and try again, or something like that, rather than redirecting the user away and making the helpful UI disappear.

Comment 3

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(Side note: Firefox [and probably Chrome/Edge] *does* allow popups that are opened in response to a user click or keypress, as described at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/pop-blocker-settings-exceptions-troubleshooting#w_is-the-pop-up-shown-after-a-mouse-click-or-a-key-press .  It only blocks [by default] popups that spawn automatically on pageload.  So: a more-robust solution here would be for the site's maintainers to have a button or a link that a user must click to trigger whatever popup is needed here -- this would be allowed by the built-in popup blocker.)

Comment 4

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Attachment: screencast 1: showing how the site shoots itself in the foot with its post-alert redirect

Comment 5

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Comment on attachment 8983287 [details]
screencast 1: showing how the site shoots itself in the foot with its post-alert redirect

In this screencast, I circle (with my mouse cursor) the two pieces of Firefox UI that *would let you allow popups from this domain* -- and as you can see, those two pieces disappear as soon as the site redirects you away when you click its "OK" button to dismiss its alert.

So: it asks you to enable popups, but then it does a redirect which prevents you from enabling popups. :(

Comment 6

[Andy Kochendorfer]

I am happy to put you in touch with the vendor engineering team if you would like to discuss this further with them. I cannot make the changes that you request.

Comment 7

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Update from trying to load the URL during the livestream just now:
 - The first time I load the URL (after starting Firefox), I hit the problem as shown in the attached screencast.
 - The second time I load the URL (e.g. open a new tab and paste the URL into URLbar), **everything works fine** -- no popups or popup requests appear. I just end up at the livestream.
 - If I restart my browser, then I'm reset back to the first state again -- the first visit triggers the issue and bumps me to the landing page, vs. second visit is fine.

So: they don't seem to *really* need popups after all, sigh, which means the first load is always broken *for no good reason* as far as I can tell.

(In reply to Andy Kochendorfer from comment #6)
> I am happy to put you in touch with the vendor engineering team if you would
> like to discuss this further with them.

Sure, that would be nice.  The current situation -- requiring two independent loads of any emailed-out livestream URL (at least until you allow popups for no obvious reason) -- feels pretty broken. :-/  I'd like to share my above-posted screencast with someone who has the ability to investigate/fix this.

Comment 8

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Attachment: screencast 2: showing that first load of a livestream URL is broken, whereas second load is fine

Here's a screencast to illustrate comment 7.

(Note: this screencast uses a pretty tiny browser window, simply to avoid inadvertently publishing any confidential visuals from the internal meeting livestream snippet that's captured at the end of the video.)

Comment 9

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(I reproduced this issue on Linux as well as Windows, too, so this isn't a platform-specific problem.)

Comment 10

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

I can reliably trigger this bug using the URL for today's project meeting, for what it's worth.

That URL is: https://onlinexperiences.com/Launch/Event.htm?ShowKey=44908&DisplayItem=E269180

Just as shown in my attached "screencast 2": the first time I load that ^ URL in a tab, I get an error page. Then if I load it in another tab, it works fine.

Comment 11

[Andy Kochendorfer]

Please add an exception by going to `Advanced`, and then `Add Exception`, and then `Confirm Security Exception` in the popup. The INXPO platform functions in this manner.

Comment 12

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

(In reply to Andy Kochendorfer from comment #11)
> Please add an exception by going to `Advanced`, and then `Add Exception`,
> and then `Confirm Security Exception` in the popup. The INXPO platform
> functions in this manner.

"Confirm Security Exception" is part of the SSL error page, not popup blocking. Are you sure this comment is on the right bug?

Comment 13

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Hi Andy! Looks like you transferred a needinfo request to me -- what was the info you needed from me here?

(Perhaps you transferred it by mistake?)

Comment 14

[Andy Kochendorfer]

This is no longer an issue on Release or Nightly. However, please disable third-party privacy blockers and/or add onlinexperiences.com to the blocker whitelist. Ublock seems to have a bug where it blocks onlinexperiences.com even once whitelisted, so we recommend disabling Ublock when watching AirMozilla streams. The Ublock developer; Raymond Hill, was notified of this on Feb. 4, 2019.