374030 - popups are blocked despite popup blocker setting after approximately a day

Status: NEW

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, defect, P5)

Description

[Stephanie Daugherty [:sdaugherty]]

Attachment: screenshot showing popup blocker in action, note preference is already to allow popup!

Tested under 2.0.0.2 Linux, another user on EFNet says that it's happening on 2.0.0.2 WinXP, I haven't tried with trunk yet since it takes close to a day to replicate.

Steps to reproduce:
1) Open and log in to www.meebo.com
2) pop the contact list and at least one message window out.
3) make sure wwwl.meebo.com and www.meebo.com have popups unblocked
4) wait. after approximately 12-24 hours the meebo popups start getting blocked despite the site being on the unblock list.

Comment 1

[Stephanie Daugherty [:sdaugherty]]

also happens on 2.0.0.3 RC1 under Windows XP.

I don't see a component for the popup blocker, apologies if I overlooked it.

-> NEW

Comment 2

[Jacob S]

I am said EFnet user, I have experienced this for sure since 2.0 (forgive me this will be the first time I really submit any bugs), and I have confirmed seeing it again in 2.0.0.2 and 2.0.0.3 as of today. It takes about 72 hours to occur in 2.0.0.3 where it was more along the lines of 24 hours in 2.0.0.2 and 2.0.

To confirm what Stephanie indicates, i have the following whitelisted:

meebo.com
wwwl.meebo.com
*.meebo.com
www.meebo.com
wwwm.meebo.com

after the given time passes you will be warned that firefox is supressing the popup but your only recourse once clicking the warning is to "unblock" pops since they are already whitelisted.

Comment 3

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

The popup blocker intentionally blocks sites from having too many open popups, regardless of whether they're whitelisted or not. The limit is set by the dom.popup_maximum pref, which defaults to a value of 20. Is that what's happening here? Are 20 popup windows open when this starts happening? Does decreasing the value of that pref decrease the amount of time it takes before this happens? If 20 windows aren't open when this happens, it might be that we're not cleaning up old windows properly, so the open-window count isn't being decreased.

Comment 4

[Stephanie Daugherty [:sdaugherty]]

Gavin, 
I had at most 3 when I tested this, so maybe we are leaking window counts.

Comment 5

[Stephanie Daugherty [:sdaugherty]]

per discussion with gavin on irc, I'm building with some debug printfs around 
gOpenPopupSpamCount to narrow this down, will hopefully have results soon.

Comment 6

[Stephanie Daugherty [:sdaugherty]]

Ok... interesting findings so far. the code that decrements gPopupOpenSpamCount doesn't seem to being hit at all until the browser exits, and then if it does hit, it only hits it once. Obviously something's wrong, but I'm still following the code to find out what.

Comment 7

[Mike Bulman]

Has there been any update on this?  I believe an application I work on is suffering from a similar issue of the popup count not properly decrementing.

Comment 8

[Jacob S]

no updates for quite some time now, the problem still exists in 2.0.0.4.

Comment 9

[Mike Bulman]

Can we get everyone on this ticket to at least vote for it?  And hopefully get it moved up a little higher than minor?  It's a crippling bug for one page web apps that are open all day.

Comment 10

[Jacob S]

ill vote to that. i have to restart meebo multiple times a day.

Comment 11

[Ryan]

I can confirm this problem is still occuring, but for me it's happening on popups created by JavaScript on the English Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/).  I use a script which dynamically adds links to JavaScript routines which open new tabs. I have wikipedia.org and en.wikipedia.org in my allow list, but after varying lengths of time, it'll start blocking the new tabs, with the "Firefox has prevented this page from opening X popups" message.  

Under the "options" button in the banner, the option is to "Forbid en.wikipedia.org", and if I click the one-time link to allow the "popup", it still won't show and the blocked count increases by one.  When it's hit this state, it won't allow the new tabs at all unless I close and restart FF, even if I disable popup blocking completely.

This was under FF 2.0.0.7 on Windows XP (32-bit).

Comment 12

[Kim Wallen]

I have a problem like this, except all popups are blocked even when the popup blocker is not checked.  There is no message that a popup is  being blocked, it just is blocked.  I have uninstalled 2.0.0.11 and reinstalled it without effect. This makes Firefox almost unusable on internal business sites that popup login pages, etc.

I have tried checking the popup blocker and adding exceptions, but popups on the exceptions are still blocked.

I changed the default number of popups from 20, but that had no effect as this happens with the very first popup.

I know at least one other user who has this problem and has given up trying to find a fix.  We are both migrating to IE 7, which is a big defeat to browser independence.

Comment 13

[Marc J. Miller]

Happens in 2.0.11 after there has been about 20 or so popups.  Try reporting your spam to SpamCop from Gmail ("View Original") and you run into this fairly quickly.  Worse, after the bar appears at the top, clicking "Show http://..." it increments the number of popups blocked.  Seems like it ran out of stack space.

Workaround:  Shut down and then reload Firefox.

Comment 14

[Mike Moening]

Any reason this can't make FF 3.1?
This bug makes it hard to write good applications that rely on popups.

Comment 15

[Marc J. Miller]

I've verified that the problem still exists in 3.0.7.  The threshold seems to be higher than it used to be, but it's still noticeable on sites that make heavy use of popups.

Comment 16

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

(In reply to comment #14)
> Any reason this can't make FF 3.1?

Well, it doesn't have a patch yet! A good first step would be to confirm the findings from comment 6 with a recent trunk build.

Comment 17

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

I'm not seeing any reason why we'd hold ship of Firefox 3.5 for this at this time, so not blocking. If we can get a verification of the problem (see comment 7 and comment 6) and a reviewed patch, we can consider taking it for this release.

Comment 18

[Darren Kalck [:D-Kalck]]

I still have the problem with Firefox 4 on Windows 7, and it's very annoying.

Comment 19

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1472046

Move all DOM bugs that haven't been updated in more than 3 years and has no one currently assigned to P5.

If you have questions, please contact :mdaly.