"window.location is null" error prevents blocking pop-ups

[SMed79]

Environment

OS: Manjaro Linux
Firefox 43.0.4
Adblock Plus 2.7.1

How to reproduce

1- Go to ​http://delishows.to/show/chicago-med/season/1/episode/6
2- Click anywhere.

Observed behaviour

A pop-up opens: ​http://fabolele.com:8098/api/v1/cspop redirecting to ​http://zeroredirect1.com/delishows.to redirecting to ​http://www.tradeadexchange.com/a/display.php. Blockable items list doesn't show a pop-up. Message "window.location is null" shows up in Error Console pointing to lib/child/utils.js line 64 (function getWindowLocation).

Expected behaviour

Pop-up should be blocked by filter ||zeroredirect1.com^$popup,third-party in EasyList, no error messages.

Background

This site hides the opener of the window using the following code:

var wnd1 = window.open("http://www.google.com/");
var wnd2 = wnd1.open();
setTimeout(function(){
  wnd2.location = "http://zeroredirect1.com";
  wnd1.close();
}, 100);

So the actual target is being opened via an intermediate window which is immediately closed. The intermediate window being gone makes it impossible for us to retrieve the pop-up's opener, instead we get a dummy window which doesn't have a location.

[mapx]

could be the same issue ? ==> https://issues.adblockplus.org/ticket/2095

[mapx]

ublock has already a $popunder feature blocking this sort of ads

[SMed79]

another example open an popup in newtab redirect to zeroredirect1.com
​http://neodrive.co/embed/QDHS20ASC0DUDU4YDWG3J6EEQ (same click anywhere).

[sebastian]

If I understand the issue correctly, this isn't a regression as implied by the title, but refers to the technique that websites deploy to circumvent popup blocking by loading the actual content in the new document, while navigating the current document to a page showing advertisement. It seems that uBlock introduced a $popunder filter option to block this behavior, which seems reasonable and worth consideration.

[Compuitguy]

Yeah

It is an old issue that is being discussed here

#2095 (Prevent background redirects)

[trev]

No, this has nothing to do with background redirects, not sure where you've got it from. Both sites open regular pop-ups, triggered by click. The problem is that our code fails to see the location of the pop-up window for some reason. I updated the description and title accordingly.

[trev]

Looking at ​http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/7042e8a19f94/dom/base/nsGlobalWindow.cpp#l9411, window.location can only be null for a window without a docshell. To my knowledge that's supposed to be an impossible situation for Gecko, but maybe something changed...

[trev]

I verified that the issue is reproducible in Firefox 38, 44 and 47 - so clearly nothing relevant changed Gecko-wise.

[Compuitguy]

My comment wasn't related to this issue.

It was a response to the the previous comments about background redirects.

[trev]

Decreased priority given that this doesn't appear to be a regression - rather the website messing with us.

[trev]

Fixed: ​https://hg.adblockplus.org/adblockplus/rev/dacf2e6c6a2a

[Ross]

Fixed. The popup tab is opened for a split second, then it is closed.

ABP 2.7.2
Firefox 38.0 / Firefox 43.0.1 / Ubuntu 14.04 x64

[SMed79]

Some one can investigate if the data: URI popup can be handled/blocked by ABP on www.jeux.com

[arthur]

I checked it with the latest dev build on ​http://neodrive.co/embed/QDHS20ASC0DUDU4YDWG3J6EEQ but it's not working. It does in Chrome though.