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redirect not working

  • 9 replies
  • 13 have this problem
  • Paskiausią atsakymą parašė John99

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Hi, after a bit of head scratching, I realized that the Firefox option to Warn if page attempts to redirect, seems to be broken.

I am getting no warning message that a redirect was attempted.

I am using the FF 25.0.1 and it is up to date as the latest.

I am using this on XP SP3.

If I turn off Warn if page attempts redirect all is well. But if it is turned on, there is no warning message, this leaves users sitting on a page unaware that they should be somewhere else.

It has the effect of breaking a websites normal operation.

IP camera live feeds don't work, nor do any pages that are supposed to constantly update.

I just noticed this after all the error pages on all sites stopped going back to the index page. Not just one site, I could blame me if that were the case. Then I thought maybe the change to PHP 5.4, and started searching for this error and ended up looking at FF. So, then I tried and turned of warn if redirect is attempted, and the sites work normally.

Without the message, we are blind to what is going on.

What has happened to the warning message?

Am I the only person with a missing warning on a redirect or refresh attempt?

All Replies (9)

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hello kduinoz, can you try to reset firefox & see if the problem is still there?

Refresh Firefox - reset add-ons and settings

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  • Do NOT click the Reset button on the Safe Mode start window.
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This came up in another thread as well: opens to a blank screen. In that case, the page used a <meta> refresh tag to redirect immediately.

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Hi philipp, this made no difference, before I reset FF, I tried it in safe mode, it was still broken.

Hi cor-el, as I mentioned above, it made no difference, I did safe mode first then a reset, the message still does not appear.

Mr jscher2000, I'm not sure what you are trying to tell me here, some more info from me though, The website I am looking at has the following refresh code at the top of the page,

header("Refresh: 30;");

A few more tests I did,

The url above is a test page and it refreshes every 10 seconds.

The warning does appear, but it is there constantly, it never goes away.

I am under the impression that the warning should only appear when a page actually attempts to refresh.

After looking at that test page, I return to my own site, same old, same old, no message, it just hangs. My page attempts a refresh every 30 seconds.

I went to the weather bureau, their radar map refreshes auto fashion as well. When I enabled the warning about being redirected and visited this page, again the warning appears and won't go away.

So, now I am wondering, what's the difference between my refresh and others on the net.

Something I also noted that happens after I have enabled the redirect warning after it has been sitting on the page and already refreshed several times.

The page actually does one more refresh and update, but, it looks as though FF is trying to show the warning, the page jumps down one line and quickly slides back up, but the message is not displayed.

I also tried this on a laptop that has been sitting for a while and has FF 22 in it, same story.


If I think of anything else, I'll be back.


I just looked at the code for the page that refreshes every 10 seconds, it has what I assume Mr jscher2000 made mention of.

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10">

and the weather bureau has, <meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="300" />

It seems that a page with this code in it, gets a permanent message about redirect warning, and it won't go away.

My own page with, header("Refresh: 30;"); Does one more refresh anyway and never sees a redirect warning at all.

Modified by kduinoz

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Hi kduinoz, your PHP refresh header is generating a strange phenomenon in my testing. Here's my test page:

If you turn OFF the warning in the options dialog and reload the test page (Ctrl+r or equivalent), the page text stays in the same position.

However, if you turn ON the warning, then each time you reload the page text will briefly slide down and up.

This suggests that Firefox is making space for the infobar to display it, but that routine gets aborted before it actually displays (or Firefox mistakenly believes the user is dismissing the bar before it displays).

Something definitely seems broken with this feature.

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Just a comment in passing. This feature is shown under the accessibility heading IIRC there have been comments made along the lines that its main intended use was so that screen readers would work ok.

Could this behaviour be intended. A major redirect would mean a screen reader was reading a page that is not expected. A simple refresh or update would leave the screen reader on the correct page just a more up to date version.

I see the same behaviour on Fx10 BTW, with both test pages, so if this is a regression it is not that recent.

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Hello jscher2000,

I've just checked your test page and yes it does the same thing. You have at least replicated what is happening with my own setup. I'm glad of that.

Modified by kduinoz

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So this it has been a known issue since 2008 and I guess nothing is likely to happen.

I suspect voting will not influence this, but whilst commenting in bugzilla is generally frowned upon: unless requested, or new technical information can be added; it is permitted to vote.