Popup blocking misses some redirects and bails out if opener is a dynamically created document

[sebastian]

Background

#3568 showed up an issue where popup blocking isn't working in Adblock Plus for Firefox when the popup is opened by a programmatically created document. This issue also effects Adblock Plus for Chrome. The cause there, however, is slightly different. Dynamically created documents aren't reported to the webRequest API. Therefore these frames are missing in the frame hierarchy recorded by Adblock Plus, and as a result the popup blocking code bails out.

Moreover, we rely on chrome.tabs.onUpdated to detect when the URL of the popup changes while still loading. This API however only indicates changes visible in the address bar. But in case of multiple redirects, Chrome doesn't update the UI for every URL in the redirect chain. Hence the popup blocking code misses some of the intermediate URLs which might trigger a popup blocking filter.

What to change

• Call chrome.webNavigation.getFrame (recursively) to discover the frame hierarchy during popup blocking, rather than relying on the frame hierarchy recorded by the webrequests code.
• Use chrome.webRequest.onBeforeRequest (instead of chrome.tabs.onUpdated) to detect changes to the URL while the popup is loading.

Expected behaviour

Popups that are either openend by a dynamically created window and/or use a lot of redirects where one of the intermediate URLs is covered by a popup blocking filter, should be automatically closed. All requests should be indicated in the devtools panel. See #3568 for an example.

[sebastian]

​https://hg.adblockplus.org/adblockpluschrome/rev/691d159e7f66

[Ross]

The example site in #3568 doesn't behave as it did before and seems to open one popup to (what I'm guessing) was a redirect but is now an error page. A) Should this error popup be blocked or doesn't it match a filter? (I tried to check) B) Is there another example URL with dynamically created windows?

[sebastian]

It seems that that website changed their behavior. From what I can tell Adblock Plus behaves correctly now, but there simply isn't a filter blocking the new popup. That behavior is also consistent with Adblock Plus for Firefox.

[arthur]

Checked it with this page: ​http://neodrive.co/embed/QDHS20ASC0DUDU4YDWG3J6EEQ

From what I can see it's working as expected. I think it makes sense to add an additional filter like ||fabolele.com^$popup,third-party though.

[Ross]

Thanks Arthur. Works as expected except in Opera 19.

ABP 1.10.2.1559
Chrome 30 / 35 / 48 / Windows 7 x64
Chrome 43 / OS X 10.11
Chrome 48 / Ubuntu 14.04 x64
Opera 23 / 27 / Windows 7 x64
Opera 28 / OS X 10.11
Opera 35 / Ubuntu 14.04 x64

[sebastian]

Assuming that popup blocking generally works in Opera 19, just not in this corner case, and that we didn't introduce a new regression, I think we can ignore the issue, there.