1822603 - Typing news: into the address bar auto opens VMWare and loads Chrome

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[nosignalrightnow]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/111.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. Opened Firefox
2. Typed news: into the browser and hit enter

Actual results:

1. VMWare Fusion Opens and loads a Windows 11 VM
2. Once booted Chrome opens

Expected results:

Firefox should've searched for news articles.

I checked for any preferences within OS, Chrome, Firefox, VMWare - none specify a short link or Chrome as default application. Not sure who to report this to, but thought would start with browser.

Could potentially be used as internal pivoting route.

Comment 1

[nosignalrightnow]

Attachment: Shows proof of concept

Comment 2

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

in a browser if you start with "word:" that looks like the start of a URL (like https://...) and the rule is to look for a handler with the OS if we don't know what to do with it. "news:" is the protocol for Usenet, a totally valid one. For whatever reason it must be registered on your system by VMWare.

This may not be what you want (https://support.mozilla.org can help you fix it) but it's not a security problem.

Comment 3

[nicoleta.sibisan]

Hello,
Thank you for bringing this up.
I searched for “news:” in address bar, in Fx versions 111.0, 112.0b8 and 113.0a1 (2023-03-29).

• on Win 11 and Ubuntu 22 the search is performed (as if just “news” was typed),
• on MacOS 12 the page is refreshed (as it is when displaying results), but no results are displayed.

If this is expected behaviour and there is indeed no security problem we can close this.
For now, I'm setting the issue as NEW and adding a component so it can be further evaluated - if the component is not the right one, please feel free to change it.

Meanwhile, if this interferes with your way of using the browser, you can try these options:

1. Type news: and select a search engine from “This time search with”.
2. Use the search bar, there you can simply search for news: - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-search-bar-firefox-toolbar

Comment 4

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

I'm not sure why this has been confirmed since no-one has reproduced. This is most likely something set-up accidentally on the user's system.

Reporter, please use https://support.mozilla.org/ in the first instance to try and help you find what is set up as a protocol handler on your system.