2
exerceo
2y

In Firefox, refreshing and redirecting pages steal the URL bar.

When a page refreshes itself or redirects elsewhere while I am entering something into the URL bar, what I entered gets replaced with the URL of the target page that was redirected to, or the URL of the current page if it refreshes itself.

This makes the user vulnerable to spam pages that refresh themselves or keep redirecting to hijack the URL bar.

If this happens the fraction of a second before I press "Enter", Firefox web searches for the end of my search term with the target URL appended to it, for example if I entered "example search term", it would search for "ermhttps://www.example.org".

You'd think this would have been fixed by now, after over a decade, but no.

Comments
  • 1
    Hmm personally think this is the correct behavior. If a page is spamming you, just close the tab and use a new one.
  • 1
    @Jifuna The new tab opens at the end rather than right to the current tab. If many tabs are open, I need to find the surrounding tabs again.

    Nonetheless, if I am typing into the URL bar, I do not wish to be interrupted.
  • 6
    @Jifuna Searching for the end of the entered text along with the URL is definitely not correct behavior, and it screams of unexpected asynchronity:

    > keyboard events
    > URL change command to browser chrome {newurl}
    > keyboard events
    > URL bar cleared
    > keyboard events
    > newurl appended to URL bar
    > submit URL bar

    I agree that it isn't an attack vector though
  • 0
    @exerceo @lbfalvy Fair enough, personally never had any problems with this
  • 0
    @Jifuna The nature of single threaded asynchronity issues is that the conditions of their emergence are notoriously difficult to pin down; they don't tend to corrupt atomic types but everything else, all datastructures and wrappers are at risk.
  • 0
    Let's fix it
  • 0
    If a pages keeps refeshing an stuff there are 3 options.

    1) don't use the site
    2) it's a porn site
    3) it's a dark web/illegal thingy
  • 0
    @KDSBest I don't see why 2 and 3 would be true.
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