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upgraded to Firefox 56.0.2 and there is no "Warn Me When Websites Try to Redirect" option

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  • Last reply by cor-el

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I updated to Firefox 56.0.2 and it no longer warns me when websites try to redirect me. The Advanced > "Warn Me When Websites Try to Redirect" option has disappeared. What is the workaround?

I updated to Firefox 56.0.2 and it no longer warns me when websites try to redirect me. The Advanced > "Warn Me When Websites Try to Redirect" option has disappeared. What is the workaround?

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All Replies (16)

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Hi  !

Would you please try this :

Type in the address bar about:config (press Enter) (promise to be careful, if asked)

Type in the searchbar and look for the preference :

accessibility.blockautorefresh

and set its value to false to turn it OFF

or set its value to true to turn it ON

Then close and restart Firefox.

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Hi Happy112, thank you for your reply. accessibility.blockautorefresh and services.sync.prefs.sync.accessibility.blockautorefresh both are both set to True, restarted Firefox, but pages are still redirecting on their own. Seems to happen only on Yahoo's news site. Maybe they have a problem, but even if they do, I would think that the settings above would still block page redirects, yes?

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Stab in the dark, but would you take a look at this please  ?

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hijacked-browser-tab-191504551.html

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The "Warn me when web sites try to redirect or reload the page" warning is meant as an accessibility feature so people with disabilities or people who use screen readers do not get confused and isn't meant as a safety protection to stop redirecting.

This feature is not perfect and only works in some cases and not in other cases like a server redirect. That is one of the reason that it has been removed from the user interface

In Firefox 56+ the "Warn me when web sites try to redirect or reload the page" setting can no longer be found in Options/Preferences.

You can modify the related pref on the about:config page to enable or disable this feature


Note that services.sync.prefs.sync.* prefs are used by Sync to sync specific prefs to other connected devices and are best left to their default value.

  • services.sync.prefs.sync.accessibility.blockautorefresh
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Hi Happy112, the yahoo article seems to address Windows 10, but I have Windows 7.

Ho Cor-el, it's always helpful to know why a feature has been removed. reply. accessibility.blockautorefresh and services.sync.prefs.sync.accessibility.blockautorefresh both are still set to True.

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firefoxq said

Hi Happy112, thank you for your reply. accessibility.blockautorefresh and services.sync.prefs.sync.accessibility.blockautorefresh both are both set to True, restarted Firefox, but pages are still redirecting on their own. Seems to happen only on Yahoo's news site. Maybe they have a problem, but even if they do, I would think that the settings above would still block page redirects, yes?

So you wanted to stop auto fresh. You need to set to False.

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Hi firefoxq, since the built-in feature only works on certain kinds of redirects/reloads and not others, you might consider searching for an add-on in case one offers a more complete solution:

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/extensions/

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firefoxq said

Hi Happy112, thank you for your reply. accessibility.blockautorefresh and services.sync.prefs.sync.accessibility.blockautorefresh both are both set to True, restarted Firefox, but pages are still redirecting on their own.

Would you please take another look at my post : When you want to turn them OFF - the value needs to be set to false

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OK, but that's seems counter intuitive (to say no or false to blocking something) but I set both to false, restarted firefox, but no change. Yahoo's news page still made the following redirects:

redirectvoluum.com fastclickrewards.com trckservfst.com plaimedia.com free-prize.today

My antivirus stopped the redirects from fully displaying. The news page hasn't redirected me yet when using IE 11.

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As this only happens on Yahoo News, maybe you could try to contact them :

https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN26180.html

https://help.yahoo.com/kb/news

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Since it started happening after upgrading Firefox, and since it hasn't occurred yet with IE, I think Yahoo would just point the finger at my browser. If this issue doesn't appear with anyone else using Firefox 56.0.2, then I would chalk it up to coincidence. Maybe I can revert to an earlier version of Firefox to see what happens - is it possible to go backwards, or will that break something?

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As far as I know we haven't had any other reports where Yahoo News was the only site that keeps redirecting .....

Going back to an earlier version  ? I wouldn't do that if I were you - especially with Firefox 57 being released in just a few days from now.

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Chosen Solution

Apparantly you're not the only one with this problem, cause I just found this :

https://forums.yahoo.net/t5/Account-security/when-reading-the-yahoo-news-feed-I-am-redirected-off-the-site/td-p/289418

Modified by Happy112

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Have you considered using an ad blocker to see whether that helps? This one is popular: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/

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The Yahoo link at least reassures me that I'm not the only one with this problem. Maybe I'll try Firefox 57 when it's available to see if that fixes it. I'll mark this closed.

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Note that only accessibility.blockautorefresh needs to be set to false.

There is normally no need to modify services.sync.prefs.sync.* prefs unless you use Sync and want to exclude specific prefs from getting synced to other devices.