Firefox addon closes the tab instead of redirecting it

[zpangwin]

Describe the bug
In recent versions of Firefox and LibreWolf, opening a youtube link for which there exists an Odysee video will close the tab rather than redirect to Odysee. Disabling the addon immediately resolves the issue. Re-enabling the addon immediately causes the issue to reappear. I happened to notice it while observing a linked video on reddit failing to open and then investigating and eventually realizing that any of that channel's videos had the same behavior. After testing, I noticed it was also happening with videos from DistroTube channel, who I knew to be on odysee as well.

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Have Watch on Odysee addon installed from addons.mozilla.org on either Firefox or LibreWolf, with the addon active/enabled
2. Have at least one other tab open or configure browser to not exit when last tab is closed.
3. Go to one of Brodie Robertson's videos, such as Distrobox Is Basically A Linux Subsystem For Linux
4. Youtube will come up and start to load, you will briefly see a top-banner flicker into existence before the tab closes. Odysee video is never displayed.

Expected behavior
Addon redirects to equivalent Odysee video, or if it fails to do so it does NOT close the tab.

For the links, I provided the equivalent channel is here and my expectation is that it should redirect to this video.

Desktop (please complete the following information):

• OS: Fedora Linux 35, using Cinnamon desktop (using the Cinnamon spin)
• Browser: occurs in both Firefox v104.0.1 and in the Firefox-based LibreWolf v105.0.3-1
• Addon Version: 2.0.1 (installed from addons.mozilla.org)

Additional context
It seems I was not the only one to encounter this issue; just the first to take the time to report it here. On the AMO reviews page for the addon, one of the reviews has:

foxtyke, Aug 13 2022

The addon seems to have an issue in which the redirected tab closes.

Unfortunately, no OS info is provided.

[Fenryrs]

I'm also having this issue on Windows. Haven't had the opportunity to test on Linux yet.

[Chirunos]

Also having this issue in Debian 11 with LibreWolf 107

[DeepDoge]

i would answer but extension on both stores(firefox/chrome) there is only the older version of the extension/addon

based on what @kodxana said, i think they rejected the update for some reason, something to do with tabs permission i think, and probably fixes this
but i dont know much, he is probably not looking into this anymore that much probably

i asked him to give me access to the extension on the store, so i can deal with updating it but he didnt say anything
it has been months

you can try to build it yourself, and see if the same problem still exist
i might fork and make my own extension and publish it, if it goes like this

[tx46]

Can we please have an update on this? I really want to not use YouTube when possible but it's annoying that the extension just closes the YouTube video sometimes.

[aykaramba]

There is nothing to fix here. This is a security issue and all you need to do is:

1. Go to Settings > Privacy and security and then uncheck "block pop-up windows".

2. What the plugin does is try to open up a new window (interpreted as new tab by browser) and then closes the old tab. This setting prevents the opening of a new window and then closes the old tab resulting in the behaviour you see.

Quick shortcut: about:preferences#privacy

If you don't like turning off that setting your can configure exceptions for it and just add the site exceptions that you want.

Potential solutions:

• The solution here is for someone to update an FAQ
• Provide a notification maybe in the "manage plugin" section that users need to change this setting as the plugin should not be changing this setting on it's own.
• Maybe, just maybe, the plugin might check for this setting (if possible) and offer for an option to add exceptions to the plugin.

[Athoz8]

Thank you @aykaramba, it worked by adding youtube.com and odysee.com to the Exceptions of Block pop-up windows, without disabling it for all sites.