I have Firefox configured to block the redirection. When it pops up its
non-informative infobar, I right-click on the page to view the source.
What I see is:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="0.1">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="-1">
<TITLE></TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY><P></BODY>
</HTML>
Yeah, not helpful at all. All that whitespace in Firefox's interstitial
blank page and Firefox gives absolutely no information. Firefox is
presenting me not with the content of the site's web page (the first one
you visit) but with Firefox's replacement until I click its Continue
button.
So I used a real oldie web browser, SamSpade, to see the actual content
of the first web page (the one pointed to by that URL). When I had
SamSpade show me the web page, I didn't see any meta-refresh or a
javascripted doc reload. The only script on that first page is for
Google Analytics (GA). It's shtml which means the real guts of the
script (server-side includes) is up on the server where you won't ever
be able to see it (read
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shtml). So there
is no meta-refresh and only a mote of script to update info on page
visit to the server-side script. I doubt GA causes page redirections
but I'm no expert on what GA can and will not do.
Note that the server can do a redirection. When you visit a page, the
web server can map it to another page. The URL doesn't change that you
see but the server dishes up a different page. This remapping is needed
for, say, when a site changes a page and wants to slide visitors to the
new page until they get around to deleting the original one from their
own cache. I don't know that any client (web browser) is going to be
able to detect that type of redirection. That is a server-side
redirection (remapping) that your client should never know about. While
there is only the <SCRIPT> block for GA, other SHTML is referenced in
this web page. We users don't know what the server script is doing.
There's also the possibility that Firefox is puking out a bogus
redirection alert. I can get Firefox to visit that URL *without*
issuing a redirection alert. I visit, I get the redirect alert. I exit
Firefox (which is configured to flush all its history) and revisit the
URL and there is no redirect alert from Firefox. After getting to the
web page (with a redirect alert that I bypassed or there was no alert
and I went straight to the page) and exiting Firefox, I even used
CCleaner to purge Firefox history and cache and revisited the URL and
sometimes Firefox goes straight to the page without its redirect alert.
So, in this case, it appears Firefox's algorithm for detecting a
redirection is flawed and is false triggering on this site. I've seen
it happen on Google web searches, too. That's why I'm on the fence as
to whether I want to leave this redirect blocking option enabled in
Firefox. Tis a nuisance already when it alerts with absolutely no
information as to where goes the redirection but it also false alerts.
I can't see that the web page is doing any redirection; however, I also
cannot see what the server-side scripts are doing. If the server is
remapping the page, the client shouldn't be able to detect that. If it
is a false alert by Firefox, well, I don't know its code to know why it
*thinks* this page is doing a redirection.
I've had Firefox do this before where it halts on the redirection to
show its infobar but I can't see where the original page did any
redirection. So far, I've excused the interruption with me being
ignorant of what methods can cause a redirection other than the ones
that I know about and can see in a web page (meta-refresh and Javascript
doc load).