1879355 - clicking on a <button> tag wrapped in a <a href> with a correct link crashes the mail rendering section.

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, defect)

Description

[info]

Attachment: screenshot_of_system_information.jpg

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

(tested in troubleshooting mode aswell)

• create new message.
• click insert → html...
• insert a button element wrapped in an anchor tag like this

<a target="_blank" href="http://www.example.com/"> <button>Button</button> </a>

• send mail
• open the sent mail and try to click on the link

Actual results:

hovering over the button shows the correct link in the status bar.
But clicking the button opens a new tab in thunderbird and tries loading the page, but nothing happens.
when clicking on the link while target="_blank" is omitted in the anchor tag, the mail rendering component is completely frozen even, so no other emails can be viewed until thunderbird gets restarted.

right clicking the button and clicking "open link in browser" works.

Expected results:

Open the link in the standard browser. Or if button tags cannot be supported in the mail client for some reason impede the current behavior at least of trying to load the link inside thunderbird and crashing the mail viewport.

Comment 1

[Francesco]

Another <button> issue in bug 1876562.

Comment 2

[solange]

Hi, thank you for reporting on this! Confirming this bug, I am able to reproduce this on TB 115.8 using Mac 14.2.1 as well as Windows 10.

Comment 3

[Merome]

Bug confirmed also on TB 115.9.0 / Linux and Windows.
Lots of HTML forged mails from professional sources are using <button> inside <a>. As it can freeze Thunderbird entirely, it's a major bug.

I'm not sure this bug is a "Message compose Window" problem, as it occurs when message are composed from other sources than Thunderbird as well.
Triage is not good, IMHO. Maybe "Message reader UI" ?

Comment 4

[chrizilla]

changes based on comments #2 and #3

Comment 5

[Merome]

Bug still present on TB 128.0 esr

Comment 7

[Hartmut Welpmann [:welpy-cw]]

Attachment: Bug 1879355 - Fix clicking on <button> inside <a href>. r=#thunderbird-reviewers

Comment 10

[Hartmut Welpmann [:welpy-cw]]

Attachment: clickableContent.eml

Testcase – The first two buttons don't work correctly.

Comment 11

[Hartmut Welpmann [:welpy-cw]]

Copied to an IMAP folder, those two buttons show the behavior from the description. In a local folder on the other hand, those links are opened in Thunderbird itself, which might be a security issue.

Comment 13

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/dc9f57ecceff
Fix clicking on <button> inside <a href>. r=mkmelin

Comment 14

[Corey Bryant]

Is this ready for uplift to beta?

Comment 15

[Hartmut Welpmann [:welpy-cw]]

Comment on attachment 9426759 [details]
Bug 1879355 - Fix clicking on <button> inside <a href>. r=#thunderbird-reviewers

[Approval Request Comment]
User impact if declined: See comment 0 and comment 11
Testing completed (on c-c, etc.): c-c
Risk to taking this patch (and alternatives if risky): low, automated test included

Comment 16

[Corey Bryant]

Comment on attachment 9426759 [details]
Bug 1879355 - Fix clicking on <button> inside <a href>. r=#thunderbird-reviewers

[Triage Comment]
Approved for beta

Comment 17

[Corey Bryant]

Thunderbird 132.0b2:
https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-beta/rev/68930f480bd7