237198 - Windows reserved words and certain special characters accepted as bookmarks.

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Saurabh Gupta]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8

Firefox accepts Window's reserved words and certain characters (not accepted by
I.E.) as names of bookmarks.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open the Add Bookmarks option and enter a window's reserved word such as prn or
   com1 or com2.
2. Just click 'Ok'
3. Follow step 1 and enter any character from this set {\ / : * ? < > | }
4. Then click 'Ok'
Actual Results:  
Firefox accepts both, the Window's reserved words and the special characters
(not accepted by I.E.). 

Firefox also allows multiple bookmarks with the same name and does not warn if a
bookmark exists with the same name.

Firefox accepts the characters {\ / : * ? < > | } as names of bookmarks, which
are not accepted by I.E. (Oracle)

Expected Results:  
ORACLE: I.E. does not accept the Windows reserved words and rather 'crashes'.
However it does promt stating that the reserved word already exists as a
bookmark name (which is not the case). Upon accepting to 'overwrite' the browser
crashes.
* Hence the usual expectation would be that Firefox rejects window's reserved
words as names for bokmarks.


Follow up tests:
----------------
1. Tested this against an Oracle (I.E.) and found that it crashes on accepting 
   Window's reserved words.
2. Picked the set of characters not accepted by I.E. (Oracle) and fed them as 
   names of bookmarks for Firefox, and found it accepts almost everything.
3. Copy-Pasted all forms of data, such as, entire MS Word table, special symbols
   from MS Word, and found that the Firefox accepts it readily, although with 
   strange  character representations (As compared to I.E.)
4. Tested for the same on Suse Linux and the misbehavior holds true.


Importance of the bug:
----------------------
1. Using Window's reserved words as names of bookmarks (files) can/may easily
conflict with the system as the file whose path contains reserved words can
cause the machine to crash (which was depicted when performing test with I.E.).
Hence accepting a bookmark name which is a Window's reserved word can cause
misbehavior of the program and the system itself.

2. The special characters from the set {\ / : * ? < > | }, consists of
characters used in path names, query strings etc. and hence can conflict when
given as file names(bookmarks). I.E. (Oracle) for this reason prohibits use of
these characters for use in favorites names.

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

> Using Window's reserved words as names of bookmarks (files)

Unlike IE, Mozilla does not store each bookmark in a separate file.  So the
bookmark names are not used as filenames.  Where is the problem, then?

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

*** Bug 237199 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 3

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

moving components

Comment 4

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

<offtopic>what's with this "Oracle" thing?  second time I've seen that, is it
some form of "baseline" or something similar?  Capitalized, I'm thinking of the
database company.</offtopic>

back on topic, INVALID

we don't save bookmarks in individual files, so this is irrelevant and not a bug
whatsoever.  Just because IE's bookmarks infrastructure makes these characters
illegal, and their lack of error/exception handling causes crashes, doesn't mean
we have to adhere to those limitations.  Making assumptions is bad, making leaps
of logic is even worse.

Comment 5

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

sorry for bugspam, long-overdue mass reassign of ancient QA contact bugs, filter on "beltznerLovesGoats" to get rid of this mass change