Firefox, Adsense or Hacked Website?

FF warning message, insufficient information

[piatkow]

Naturally I spot what may or may not be a problem when away from home for a few days and using somebody else's PC which is running FF20
Without being able to investigate further for several days I can't work out if this is a FF issue, if my site has been hacked or an effect of running Adsense.

Looking at a page on one of my sites we had a message "Firefox prevented this page from automatically redirecting to another page". Naturally as it wasn't my PC I wouldn't risk clicking OK and FF gives no information about the potential redirect. Viewing page source shows nothing in the header that would force a redirect. I am aware that this message is an option that can be switched off but again I don't want to play around with the settings on a borrowed PC.

Exploring my site I discovered that this only appeared on pages with Adsense.

Does anybody have experience of this being a spurious message or should I be speaking to my host about security?

edit
After submitting this post the same message came up on return to webmaster world.
/edit

[phranque]

there should be a checkbox in your Accessibility settings for "Warn me when web sites try to redirect or reload the page"

[dstiles]

I get this every time I submit a posting on WebmasterWorld. I fiddled around with settings but short of unticking the checkbox I failed. I just click Accept for WebmasterWorld when I post. This has been happening for a year or so now, not just FF 20.

[incrediBILL]

It's certainly not AdSense.

If you have any 3rd party ad platforms, tracking scripts, etc. on your site I'd suspect them or your site might be hacked. Try using NoScript and disable all javascript on your site and then you can inspect it without redirects unless it's a meta redirect.

Using NoScript, you can re-enable each ad network or 3rd party javascript being loaded one at a time until you find out which one is the culprit.

Not hard, takes just a few minutes to figure it out by process of elimination.

[piatkow]

Its not just my site, I see this other sites and on the master copies of my site pages on my own PC as well as at the host.

I tested as suggested and the message appeared as soon as I allowed an Adsense ad. I permitted the redirect and went nowhere.

[piatkow]

Just to add, local testing was done on a clean page of course.

[Robert Charlton]

Just for the h* of it, I thought I'd Google the FF message you quoted. Google returned roughly 6,000 exact matches. I'll link to the first one, which I assume is OK, since it's Mozilla Support....

how to avoid, "firefox prevented this page from automatically redirecting to another page."
http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/890333 [support.mozilla.org]

See:

Firefox/Firefox > Preferences > Advanced > General : Accessibility : [ ] "Warn me when web sites try to redirect or reload the page"

The setting in "Firefox > Preferences > Advanced > General" is meant as an accessibility feature, as you can see by the label of that section, so that people with disabilities or people who use screen readers do not get confused and is not meant as a safety protection to stop redirecting.

[lucy24]

Further note: This feature in FF-- it goes back a couple of versions-- only applies to redirects that happen on the page itself. It doesn't apply to server-side redirects, as when you ask for example.com/index.php and get sent to www.example.com/

Although it's intended as an accessibility feature, there's nothing to prevent you from using it as a security feature ;)

:: detour to pore over FF settings ::

I was hoping to find an Exceptions list-- same as for cookies, popups and so on-- but it seems to be hiding.