Consider the following case:
Visual reperesentation of steps
Note: We don’t have control over Website C and can’t control how they’re redirecting back to Website B. Also this is happening only on Firefox/Safari. On Chrome we're able to get the original opener reference after redirections.
In case Website C is redirecting with rel=noopener the window.opener should be null (Reference from MDN). I’m not able to understand in which case the window.opener can be the current window object and why it is happening on Firefox/Safari but not on Chrome? And is there anything we can do anywhere except Website C to prevent this?
This is possible in firefox and Safari, window.opener can be current window when you add target _self. If you do window.open('someurl', '_self') then window.opener will be current window and will open in same tab instead of a new tab. This only happens in safari and firefox(from what i have observed). All chromium based browsers don't change the original window opener in any case.
I don't know the exact reason why safari and firefox handles it this way I tried to find the reason but can't find it.
I faced this issue once and the solution which we did was to ask website C to use either window.location.replace or window.location.href to redirect back to website B so they open website b in same tab.
