788497 - skip redirects when hitting the back button

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Brad Lassey [:blassey] (use needinfo?)]

I ran into the situation where a link from facebook went through several redirecters, so clicking back just resulted in seeing the content reloaded. So I hit back several times quickly to try to get through the redirecters and back to my facebook app, but I guess I hit back one too many times and wound up on the home screen.

This situation is ridiculous. When a user hits back they want to see the previous thing they saw. The user should not have to guess how many redirecters they went through to get there.

Comment 1

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

I can't imagine this is a Fennec bug. Desktop does the same thing, so this will likely need to be fixed at the platform, session history, level.

Comment 2

[Matt Brubeck (:mbrubeck)]

We already do the right thing in the case of normal HTTP redirectls; for example if you navigate to http://bit.ly/NMUBcS (which redirects to google.com) then press back, you will go back to your starting location, not to the bit.ly URL.

If this is broken, it's probably because the "redirect" page is actually loading and running some JavaScript or something instead of using a "real" redirect.

Comment 3

[[:Aleksej]]

Reproduced with Nightly 20121023030553 Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:19.0) Gecko/19.0
Firefox/19.0 at www.google.com → Docs (http://docs.google.com redirects to accounts.google.com).

There is bug 606286, which is supposed to have been fixed in June 2012.

Comment 4

[Nicolas Barbulesco]

(In reply to Brad Lassey [:blassey] from bug 788497 comment #0)

> I ran into the situation where a link from facebook went through several
> redirecters, so clicking back just resulted in seeing the content reloaded.
> So I hit back several times quickly to try to get through the redirecters
> and back to my facebook app, but I guess I hit back one too many times and
> wound up on the home screen.
> 
> This situation is ridiculous. When a user hits back they want to see the
> previous thing they saw.

Not necessarily. Sometimes, a redirecting page redirects too quickly, or gives something wrong, like an error page. In some cases, I just want to go back to the redirecting page. For instance, to retry, or to tweak the address, or just to see the address in order to know what I missed. For instance, there are wicked redirect pages who are supposed to redirect me to the target content I want but who randomly redirect to some other “partner” page. When that happens, I just go back to the redirecting page, and, this time, or the next one…, the page redirects me to the real target content. And I have another trick, which can work except when the the wicked redirecting page is so wicked that she hides the target address in coded characters. When I am back at the redirecting page, I can modify the address in the address bar in this way : I see “http://www.wickedredirectingsite.com/bla/bla/bla?target=http://www.target.com/content”, and I change it in order to go to “http://www.target.com/content”. If you need time to do that, you can quickly press “Esc” or the “Stop” button. I don't need to hurry nor to press any of these, because I have ticked in Firefox' prefs “Warn me before redirecting me”. This ill-named pref asks me before redirecting me, and redirects me only if I say “OK”. This pref does not do her job in all cases, but this is another story, which is signalled in several Bugzilla requests. If I remember correctly, the fact that this pref has to correct her text to “Ask me before redirecting me” is signalled in Bugzilla too. By the way, this pref is not at the right place in “Accessibility”, I would rather put it in “Content”.
Let's get back to our sheep. With this pref ticked, you don't need to hurry. You can click “Back” once, see the question, and click “Back” again. And so on if you stumble upon several consecutive redirecting pages. You go back to the page you want. Well, except in the cases where this pref fails to do her job.
Having the “Back” button skip redirects would prevent me from going back in some cases. It would make some pages disappear from the  tabnavigation history, and this would be *bad*. I was at these pages, even for a short time, so they have to be present in the tab navigation history. The skipping behaviour you ask could lead to losing a page, I could lose the track of the page I was supposed to go, this would be data loss and would annoy me. This would be *bad*. The wicked redirect pages I have told about are encountered typically in porn sites, but in other sites too.
And, if the “Back” button does not skip redirects, you have an easy way of going back as far as you want. Even without the pref “Warn me before redirecting me”. You can click on the little downward arrow of the “Back” button, and in the local menu you can choose the page which is before the redirect.

Comment 5

[Nicolas Barbulesco]

(In reply to Nicolas Barbulesco from comment #4)

And a much more frequent use case occurs with “not found” pages. You land on a page telling that your requested story is not found, sometimes telling you why ; and you get swiftly redirected to the site's home page. So the “Back” button has to be enabled, to help you understand what happened — especially if that happened in a background tab. And the originally requested page has to be in the tab navigation history, because you were interested in that story, not in the site's home page. So you can go back to this address, view the address of the story, with its title sometimes, and you use that info to proceed as follows. You know what you missed, and you forget about it for now. Or you are really interested in that stuff and you look for it…

Comment 6

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Bug 606286 might have fixed this for mobile. qawanted.

Comment 8

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

Apparently still broken across channel according to the dupe?

Comment 9

[O. Atsushi (Torisugari)]

I'm afraid Firefox guys don't want to fix this bug that eagerly.

What we can do for this bug is to set "accessibility.blockjsredirection" to true in <mobile.js>, if this problem is really fixed by default. Otherwise, it should be optional as it is, though it would be difficult for mobile phone users to edit <about:config>.

Comment 10

[O. Atsushi (Torisugari)]

(In reply to O. Atsushi (Torisugari) from comment #9)
> - if this problem is really fixed by default
> +                 should be

Comment 11

[Brad Lassey [:blassey] (use needinfo?)]

Attachment: patch

Comment 12

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

I am reading through bug 606286, trying to understand the implications of the preference...

Comment 13

[O. Atsushi (Torisugari)]

(In reply to Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) from comment #12)
> I am reading through bug 606286, trying to understand the implications of
> the preference...

"accessibility.blockjsredirection" blocks redirection only when the "Forward" button is enabled (i.e. the user pushed "back" button). There's a JavaScript version in bug 803590, though I'm not sure smaug will say OK.

These days I think maybe it should also check "redirecting to" page and "forwarding to" page are identical to each other... However, anyway, we need to show we do want to fix this.

Comment 14

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Comment on attachment 688918 [details] [diff] [review]
patch

r- because it's unclear exactly what this does. Let's get more details on how this feature works so we aren't surprised later.

Comment 16

[Brad Lassey [:blassey] (use needinfo?)]

filter on [mass-p5]

Comment 17

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

Maybe has a fix, certainly still annoying -- can we move this forward?

Comment 18

[u526790]

Would like to see this, too! For example, visit www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-we-have-more-than-1-5-million-windows-10-insiders/#ftag=RSSbaffb68. It is impossible to go back using a single click on the history-back button.

Please change this.

Comment 19

[BMO Automation]

We have completed our launch of our new Firefox on Android. The development of the new versions use GitHub for issue tracking. If the bug report still reproduces in a current version of [Firefox on Android nightly](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix) an issue can be reported at the [Fenix GitHub project](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/). If you want to discuss your report please use [Mozilla's chat](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix#Connect_to_Matrix) server https://chat.mozilla.org and join the [#fenix](https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fenix:mozilla.org) channel.