411927 - [10.5] Websites improperly restricted by Parental Controls on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Shell Integration, defect)

Description

[saxifrage]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11

With Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) Parental Controls active for a user account (i.e., the account type is "Managed") and website access in Parental Controls preferences for that user set to completely unrestricted, websites are still automatically blocked. Testing in Safari shows proper behaviour: website access is unrestricted. This occurs in both Mac OS 10.5 and 10.5.1.

Standard and Admin accounts are obviously unaffected, only Managed users are affected.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Using an admin account, open Account Preference pane in System Preferences.
2. Create a new user and click "Enable Parental Controls" checkbox.
3. Click "Open Parental Controls" button.
4. In "Content" tab, make sure "Allow unrestricted access to websites" radio button is selected.
5. Close System Preferences and log out.
6. Log in as the new user and launch Firefox.
7. Navigate to http://www.dickbuscharchitects.com/ (an innocuous site) or your favourite restriction-worthy website.
Actual Results:  
The standard Leopard content-restriction page will appear.

Expected Results:  
The desired site should appear in the browser window.

Comment 1

[Marcia Knous [:marcia]]

I don't see this using Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/2007112718 Firefox/2.0.0.11. I followed the reporter's instructions, and I am able to launch sites fine using both 2.0.0.11 and the latest trunk build.

Comment 2

[Marcia Knous [:marcia]]

Well, after I came back to this machine and launched a few different sites, I did get blocked. But the odd thing is it was not consistent. I could not access the site in Comment 0, but many other sites such as mazdausa.com, salon.com, etc could be accessed. So, confirming based on the fact that I see it happening on some sites, but not all sites.

Comment 3

[saxifrage]

Sorry, I mustn't have been clear. Not all sites are being blocked, only ones that (I personally guess) would have been blocked by Leopard's "Try to automatically block inappropriate content" setting.

Comment 4

[saxifrage]

I've since seen Safari block some sites under these circumstances. That seems to indicate that the bug is in the Parental Controls, not in Firefox's integration with the OS. Perhaps the bug's status should be changed to "Resolved: Must Yell at Apple".

Comment 5

[brian.paquin]

Maybe this is the wrong place to comment (and another bug should be added), but we are having issues with Firefox and Leopard Parental Controls as well. Users are able to view any website, but are not able to submit a POST request. There is a hack that can get around this (prohibit the local Apache from running), but I am still hoping this can be fixed in Firefox (as Safari does not have this issue).

Comment 6

[saxifrage]

FYI, further experience lead me and other techs in my department to believe that the fault is in Apple's handling of headers. Parental Controls have broken internal and external sites in ways that only make sense if the TCP and/or HTTP headers are being badly munged (logins breaking, session problems, character encoding problems). It was observed in Safari and Firefox both, though the circumstances that broke sites in Firefox were more common. I really don't think this is something that can be fixed in Firefox. The fact that Safari "works" under the some of the same circumstances is probably just an artifact of being written for Apple's broken TCP code.