Bouncer links fail to activate client if page's canonical URL doesn't match its actual URL

[robertknight]

Bouncer links fail to activate the browser extension if the URL that bouncer navigates the browser to ends up redirecting to a different URL with the same content.

One case where this can happen is if a URL A declares a canonical URL B which redirects to URL A. For example https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/why-facets declares a canonical URL of https://pfrazee.com/blog/why-facets. That canonical URL redirects to the www.-prefixed version. When annotating on this page, the canonical URL is used as the annotation's URL. When bouncer detects the extension and asks it to navigate to this URL and activate the client, it will initiate the navigation and then schedule a "pending activation" once the client arrives on the target URL. However since the URL immediately redirects, the user never lands on the expected target URL (ie. the page's canonical URL) and the pending activation is never applied.

[robertknight]

One way we could address this problem would be to avoid testing the tab URL against the specific URL we originally navigated to and instead just wait for the page URL to "settle". A downside of this is that it will break scenarios that currently work where the user gets redirected to a login page, then back to the original URL after they login. In the current implementation, the pending activation will remain pending on the login page and get applied until the user navigates afterwards.

Another approach would be to inject a script into the tab to read the canonical URL if there is a pending activation, and match the URL against both the tab URL and the canonical URL.