1506136 - Converted live bookmarks that aren't using https don't show blue star when opened because their sites redirect to secure (https) equivalents

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Graveyard :: RSS Discovery and Preview, defect)

Description

[Anca Soncutean, Desktop QA]

Attachment: screencast issue.gif

[Affected versions]: 
- 64.0b8 (20181108141956)

[Affected platforms]:
- Windows 10 x64
- Ubuntu 18 x64
- macOS 10.13.6

[Steps to reproduce]:
1. Launch an old version of Firefox (63 or earlier) using a clean profile
2. Enable the Bookmarks Toolbar
3. Add several live bookmarks (e.g. https://kotaku.com/, https://abcnews.go.com/, https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing, https://www.foxnews.com/, http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/topNews)
4. Make sure to open at least one feed article from every site
5. Close the browser
6. Open a recent version of Firefox (64 or later) using the same profile
7. Open the sites one at the time, from the Bookmarks Toolbar and observe the Star icon inside the Address bar for each of them

[Expected result]:
- The Star icon color is changed to blue for all the sites.

[Actual result]:
- For some of the sites (https://abcnews.go.com/, https://www.foxnews.com) the Star icon is not changed to blue.

[Regression range]: 
- This issue is reproducible all way back to Fx DevEdition 64.0b1 (20181015220336).

[Additional Notes]:
- If step 4 is omitted, the sites are displayed as unreadable XML file, but the Star icon is blue for all the sites
- This issue is reproducible regardless if the live bookmarks were created inside the Bookmarks menu or Other Bookmarks.

Comment 1

[:Gijs (out for now; he/him)]

What are the URLs in the bookmark properties for the sites that don't show a star?

Comment 2

[Anca Soncutean, Desktop QA]

(In reply to :Gijs (he/him) from comment #1)
> What are the URLs in the bookmark properties for the sites that don't show a
> star?

Here are the location URLs for the affected sites, mentioned above: http://abcnews.go.com/ and http://www.foxnews.com/.

Comment 3

[Anca Soncutean, Desktop QA]

Attachment: Properties URLs.png

(In reply to :Gijs (he/him) from comment #1)
> What are the URLs in the bookmark properties for the sites that don't show a
> star?

Comment 4

[:Gijs (out for now; he/him)]

So the properties for the bookmark have `http://` and the sites redirect to `https://` - off-hand, I don't know how the bookmarks ended up with not having 'https' - are the feeds that you're using in 63 on http: ? How do you access the feeds, given the URLs in comment #0 are for pages and not for feeds?

I doubt there's much we can do about this either way - if people already have live bookmarks that don't use https for the site URI, but where the main URI redirects, there's no way for us to know.

Marco, are there broader bookmarks bugs on file about this type of conundrum? Should we just close this as invalid?

Comment 5

[:Gijs (out for now; he/him)]

(In reply to :Gijs (he/him) from comment #4)
> So the properties for the bookmark have `http://` and the sites redirect to
> `https://` - off-hand, I don't know how the bookmarks ended up with not
> having 'https' - are the feeds that you're using in 63 on http: ? How do you
> access the feeds, given the URLs in comment #0 are for pages and not for
> feeds?

Ni for this...

Comment 6

[:Gijs (out for now; he/him)]

Looks like at least for fox news, http://feeds.foxnews.com/foxnews/latest is the feed, and it isn't accessible over https.

Comment 7

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Bookmarks are not aware of redirects, atm, see the quite old bug 643554 and wontfixed bug 327024

Comment 8

[Anca Soncutean, Desktop QA]

> > So the properties for the bookmark have `http://` and the sites redirect to
> > `https://` - off-hand, I don't know how the bookmarks ended up with not
> > having 'https' - are the feeds that you're using in 63 on http: ? How do you
> > access the feeds, given the URLs in comment #0 are for pages and not for
> > feeds?


I’ve accessed all the  pages mentioned in comment 0, by using the Subscribe to this Page option from Menu bar. In case of https://www.foxnews.com/, the feed page displayed is https://feeds.feedburner.com/foxnews/latest not http://feeds.foxnews.com/foxnews/latest as mentioned in comment 6 (I can confirm that, for me also, this link isn't accessible over https). The contet for both links looks similar.
Here is a screencast related to this site before and after conversion: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dhUB0NMyvHFVamdvtSX-Ljz5O12dlZ4m/view?usp=sharing

The feed page associated with the other site affected by this behavior is https://abcnews.go.com/abcnews/topstories.

Comment 9

[:Gijs (out for now; he/him)]

(In reply to Anca Soncutean [:Anca], Desktop Release QA from comment #8)
> > > So the properties for the bookmark have `http://` and the sites redirect to
> > > `https://` - off-hand, I don't know how the bookmarks ended up with not
> > > having 'https' - are the feeds that you're using in 63 on http: ? How do you
> > > access the feeds, given the URLs in comment #0 are for pages and not for
> > > feeds?
> 
> 
> I’ve accessed all the  pages mentioned in comment 0, by using the Subscribe
> to this Page option from Menu bar. In case of https://www.foxnews.com/, the
> feed page displayed is https://feeds.feedburner.com/foxnews/latest not
> http://feeds.foxnews.com/foxnews/latest as mentioned in comment 6 (I can
> confirm that, for me also, this link isn't accessible over https). The
> contet for both links looks similar.
> Here is a screencast related to this site before and after conversion:
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dhUB0NMyvHFVamdvtSX-Ljz5O12dlZ4m/
> view?usp=sharing
> 
> The feed page associated with the other site affected by this behavior is
> https://abcnews.go.com/abcnews/topstories.

Ah, both of these feed pages use a `<link>` to point back to the "normal" website, and that link tag uses `http`, even if the result of those pages redirects to https.

I don't think there's any realistic way for Firefox to deal with this eventuality. People can update their own bookmarks to fix this if/when necessary, but we can't assume that the redirect exists, and automatically fetching the main site's page to check if it does exist has privacy implications, so then we're very far into diminishing return territory.