1799656 - No way to restore the popups browser message from Preferences once dismissed

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Site Permissions, defect, P5)

Description

[Stuart Langridge]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:106.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/106.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. Clicked a web page link which wanted to open a window as a popup
2. Saw the banner at the top of the page reading "Firefox prevented this site from opening a pop-up window"
3. Accidentally clicked "don't show this message when popups are blocked" in that banner's Preferences menu
4. Tried to get that message back and was unable to

Actual results:

In Firefox's Settings > Privacy and Security > Permissions there is a "Block pop-up windows" checkbox and an "Exceptions" button. The checkbox, being a checkbox, offers two options:

1. allow all popups
2. don't allow popups, and put an icon in the URL bar indicating that the popup was blocked

There is no way, in the standard UI, to re-enable the banner message once you've chosen "don't show this message when popups are blocked". To re-enable that banner, you have to set "privacy.popups.showBrowserMessage" to "true" in about:config, which is considerably more difficult to do, and users are warned away from about:config for good reasons.

Expected results:

The Settings should make the "Block pop-up windows" checkbox actually be a three-option dropdown, with "block", "don't block", and "ask every time" options, where "block" does what the ticked checkbox does now, "don't block" does what the unticked checkbox does now, and "ask every time" brings the message banner back if disabled. It should default to "ask every time", as it does at the moment. (The wording of these options can of course be changed to fit in with other Firefox UI wording; the point is that it's easy to (accidentally!) turn off the banner and not possible to reverse that.)

Comment 1

[Release mgmt bot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Core::Widget: Gtk' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Paul Zühlcke [:pbz]]

Looks like we only ever set this to false here https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/b6d0ad6ba24b3d075e357e52160cd8fc7f911ba9/browser/base/content/browser.js#1278-1287. Not having a way in the UI to show this message again seems problematic. A checkbox in preferences would be nice to have. Would accept a patch, given we can find a good spot for it. For now modifying the pref or resetting preferences is a workaround.