479355 - Annoying print popups

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[u315569]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/1.0.154.48 Safari/525.19
Build Identifier: 

We at Chromium got a report about JavaScript spawning print popups:
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=7880

Firefox has some build in protection against this, but is can be bypassed:
http://skypher.com/SkyLined/Repro/MSIE/Print%20popups/repro.html



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Open URL
2.Try to close Firefox or navigate away or open another tab.
3.
Actual Results:  
Print popups show up over and over making it hard to do anything

Expected Results:  
Print popups should either stop showing up automatically or the user should have a way of preventing any further popups.

Comment 1

[Kevin Brosnan]

Generally bugs like this are duped to bug 61098. Which is a request to have a way to break out of infinite javascript loops with blocking ui such as alert().

Comment 2

[u315569]

Fair enough, note that this is not necessarily an infinite JavaScript loop alone; my repro uses a page reload to complete the loop. If popups are disabled for one page, then a page reload would reset that. If popups are disabled for one URL, then a navigation to another URL could reset that. If popups are disabled for one domain, then different domains/IP addresses could get around that.

A solution to this would be to use the stop button to stop everything: JavaScript and any pending navigations. I wonder if Flash can be used to get around that...

Comment 3

[Jesse Ruderman]

SkyLined, you might be interested in my suggestions in bug 331334, in particular (D).

Comment 4

[u315569]

Yes, this is an interesting problem. I realized there are plenty more ways to open popups and all would need to be considered.

Which reminds me, is there not an open bug for making pop-ups only modal for the tab, not the entire application? It seems to me that would allow you to continue interacting with the rest of the browser and close the tab or navigate to another site.

Comment 5

[Jesse Ruderman]

Right, that's bug 61098's sister, bug 59314.  I think that's even harder to fix, and it leaves the problem of users potentially not *knowing* that the dialog is nonmodal.

Comment 6

[RNicoletto]

(In reply to comment #5)
> Right, that's bug 61098's sister, bug 59314.  

So... we should mark this bug as DUPLICATE?

Comment 7

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

Reporter, are you still seeing this issue with Firefox 3.6.13 or later in safe mode? If not, please close. These links can help you in your testing.
http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Safe+Mode
http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Managing+profiles

You can also try to reproduce in Firefox 4 Beta 8 or later, there are many improvements in the new version, http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

Comment 8

[SkyLined]

@Tyler: Firefox 3.6.13: Yes, this is still possible, in both Safe Mode and normal.

Firefox 4.0b8: No, this has been fixed: another popup asks me if I want to prevent the script from showing more popups, which allows me to break the infinite loop of popups.