282515 - Allow popups from a given site for the remainder of the session (temporarily disable popup blocking for a site)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Security, enhancement)

Description

[Pavel Penaz]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b) Gecko/20050216 Firefox/1.0+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b) Gecko/20050216 Firefox/1.0+

On some pages the user does not have the ability to show a blocked popup without
permanently allowing popups on that page. One examle is the following page:
http://popupcheck.com/freescan/popup/test_unload.asp

Internet explorer behaviour in this case is giving the user the ability to
temporarily allow the popup and IE then refreshes the page to display the popup.

Would this be possible in Firefox? This feature would IMHO be extremely useful
for many users..

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

The "Show popup" feature already exists. Just click the menu bar and select the
"Show <url>" option.

Comment 2

[Pavel Penaz]

In the case on the above URL there is no option to display the popup. I should
have perhaps specified this in the bug summary but I did not know how to explain
it. Simply put: on some pages the blocked popup cannot be displayed for some
reasons, I read the reason somewhere some time ago somewhere but I forgot it
unfortunately..

-> REOPENING

Comment 3

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

In that case, it's because the site launches the popup using the onunload event.
I doubt that it's desirable to show the banner for popups that originated from
the previous site, since it would give the impression that the popup is related
to the current page, when it's not.

This is therefore WONTFIX in my opinion.

Comment 4

[Pavel Penaz]

The popup notification bar appears after refreshing the page but there is still
no possibility to show the blocked popup. I still think there should be some way
to display the popup when the popup notificiation bar is displayed on the screen.

Comment 5

[Pavel Penaz]

Better URL: http://www.experts-exchange.com/Networking/Q_21267456.html

Comment 6

[Pavel Penaz]

Yet better URL, where the popup shows consistently once per session:
http://www.popunder.com/example.html

Comment 7

[Dan M]

A problem with the suggestion in comment 0 is that sometimes the popup you get
when reloading the page isn't the same as the original popup that was blocked.
Another is that if the popup attempt was made in the unload event, why that just
makes it extra tricky to allow it temporarily, while that page is loaded.

Tablet is asking for yet another way to get at blocked popups in addition to the
menu of blocked popups, which doesn't always work. See bug 235450 for an
explanation of conditions under which we don't have enough information to
properly fill in the menu. It's a reasonable request and not quite a duplicate,
so I'm confirming.

Note that the canonical answer to this question has always been to use Pike's
Popup Allow Extension, currently at http://www.pikey.me.uk/mozilla/#pa . I'll
leave it to the application UI folks to determine whether we want something like
that built in to the core app.

Comment 8

[William Hyatt]

I would love to see an option that would temporarily allow popups from a
specific site while my current browsing session is going. Then after I close FF,
it wouldn't allow from that site anymore. For instance, if I go to a site with
screenshots of a game, I often need to allow popups from that site to see the
screenshots. Except usually its a site that I only visit once or twice and I
dont want to just put them into my allow list and allow popups from them all the
time. I just want a temporary allowance. I probably have like 100 sites in my
list that I dont really need there because I have to add them to see the popups.
Now that I know about that Allow Popups extension that lets me hold down a key
to allow popups thats a decent workaround.

However, speaking from a pure security viewpoint. Its best to give the most
limited amount of access that will get the job done. Neither firefox's current
popup features, nor this extension do that. The firefox doesn't, because in
order to see popups from a particular site, you have to allow it in your allow
list, which is a "permenant" blanket pass unless you regularly clean it out. I'd
much prefer to have only a few sites in that allow list that I trust and dont
mind popping up, and visit regularly, then to have 100 sites that I've only
visited once. And the extension doesn't accomplish that because it allows any
sites when I'm holding the bypass key, not just the specific site I want to
temporarily allow.

So anyway, I'd love to see an option to allow a specific site temporary popups
during my current browsing site only.

Comment 9

[Jo Hermans]

Sorry, wrong bug ...

Comment 10

[Peter van der Woude [:Peter6]]

*** Bug 276976 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 11

[Joe Hughes]

Refocusing this bug as an enhancement request along the lines of William Hyatt's comment; otherwise it's a duplicate of bug 264716.

Comment 12

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Not a blocker, depends on changes to nsIPermissionManager (session-only permissions) that I don't think we have cycles to implement.  There's a rash of similar RFEs that would be awesome to fix in the Firefox 3 timeframe.

Comment 13

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

*** Bug 327468 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 14

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

*** Bug 361984 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 16

[John]

I really like IE's behavior. 
What if I have some snoop in my house or somewhere that I allow on just a bit on my PC?

I cleared my data, but forgot to clear the list of all those allowed sites. Then they see some funny stuff.....

Comment 17

[Thiago Teixeira]

Another vote for this one. A "allow popups from this site for this session only" option would be great. Hopefully this one can get sneaked into 3.0