1517957 - Reading RSS Feeds takes me to platform.twitter.com/jot.html in Firefox

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 524281

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[DLD]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0

Steps to reproduce:

Tried to read certain RSS feeds in TB. An example is 

http://www.anandtech.com/rss/

Another is

http://www.honestjohn.co.uk/askhj/rss




Actual results:

Firefox opened automatically and displayed the following url

https://platform.twitter.com/jot.html

or

https://www.facebook.com/tr/

I didn't click on a link in order for it to do this and there are many RSS feeds that are doing the same thing.


Expected results:

I don't have a technical understanding of how RSS feeds work but I just want to read the feed. In my view TB should never allow a feed to open a link in Firefox unless the user clicks on the link.

I don't know why this is happening but it makes TB almost impossible to use for reading RSS feeds. 

I tried looking for an ad blocker to see if I could use that to block the link but I understand that changes have been made in TB that make ad blockers not supported. I don't know why.

If there is an option to stop this in TB I haven't found it.

Comment 1

[alta88]

Unfortunately, in Tb60 both uBlock and AdBlock Plus don't work. In current trunk, Tb66, there is partial support for webextensions and uBlock does somewhat work on feed web pages.

Many web pages are useless without javascript, and those publishers who run 3 party (crap) scripts are at fault. Once a script is run, it can make any request to another site it wants.

Comment 2

[WaltS48 [:walts48]]

Sorry for the bug noise.

Reporter

Are you really using Thunderbird 59 which is a old beta release? Check Help > Troubleshooting Information.
The current beta is 65.0b1. The current official Thunderbird release is 60.4.0.

Are you really using Firefox 56.0 which is an outdated release? The current release is 64.0.

I used to see this problem all the time with a certain contributors post in my Planet Mozilla feed. Lately it hasn't been happening.

I added both of your feeds to my Thunderbird 60.4.0 on Windows and Linux using my production profiles.
Don't have any ad blockers in my Thunderbird's.
Tested with several posts in each feed and could not duplicate the problem.

Both of my Firefox 64.0's on Windows and Linux have uBlock Origin 1.17.4 installed with just about every list enabled.

Might be you just need to update your Thunderbird and Firefox applications.

FWIW I also tried this with a test profile and only your feeds added to a Blogs & News Feeds account. I could not duplicate the bug. 

Have you done a search for a support resolution to this problem?

Comment 3

[DLD]

Thanks for the explanation. Can I block javascript in TB(In reply to WaltS48 [:walts48] from comment #2)

Sorry for the bug noise.

Reporter

Are you really using Thunderbird 59 which is a old beta release? Check Help

Troubleshooting Information.
The current beta is 65.0b1. The current official Thunderbird release is
60.4.0.

Are you really using Firefox 56.0 which is an outdated release? The current
release is 64.0.

I used to see this problem all the time with a certain contributors post in
my Planet Mozilla feed. Lately it hasn't been happening.

I added both of your feeds to my Thunderbird 60.4.0 on Windows and Linux
using my production profiles.
Don't have any ad blockers in my Thunderbird's.
Tested with several posts in each feed and could not duplicate the problem.

Both of my Firefox 64.0's on Windows and Linux have uBlock Origin 1.17.4
installed with just about every list enabled.

Might be you just need to update your Thunderbird and Firefox applications.

FWIW I also tried this with a test profile and only your feeds added to a
Blogs & News Feeds account. I could not duplicate the bug.

Have you done a search for a support resolution to this problem?

I am running older versions because the newer versions broke things that are important to me. I get that uBlock might work but I actually hate it. I run it in Chrome and it is the main reason I don't use Chrome.

What I love about FF and TB is that I can customise them how I want and when support for the old extensions was removed I could no longer do that. For me "Element Hiding" for Adblock Plus is the most important thing. Maybe I can do the same in uBlock but I've never worked out how and I hate the user interface. Element hiding just works - or did! Element hiding has always worked well in RSS feeds. Most people think that blocking adds is the most important thing (and I do get that) but to me the most important thing was to stop web sites displaying things I don't want them to display. I would actually quite like ads if they are relevant to the subject and do not keep flashing when I'm trying to read them. Flashing gif's should be banned!

If I can work how I want on the latest versions I will happily upgrade but I don't know how to do it. Personaly I never understood why support for the old extensions was removed without telling people how to do things with the update. I assume you know what extensions people use and thus how many people were affected?

Comment 4

[u645966]

am having the same issue with

icedove 37 (based on thunderbird)

reading rss feeds inside the program would provoke the opening of the following link in the default browser firefox-esr (on debian 7.11)

https://platform.twitter.com/jot.html