Rusty Bird:
Georg Koppen:
We won't disable extension updates by flipping some preference in Tor Browser. Users who install extensions which we don't ship (even though this is strongly discouraged) should get updates.
Oh right, my bad for not thinking of that. It makes extensions.update.enabled=false a non-starter, for sure.
However, it is planned at least since the AMO pinning fiasco we witnessed last year (see #20146) that we essentially prevent all extensions *we* ship from auto-updating.
Even better!
We'll start with doing so for HTTPS-Everywhere (#10394) which is currently blocked on HTTPS-Everywhere getting the ruleset updates disentangled from the extension updates. Once we are done with HTTPS-Everywhere and got some experience what this means for our releases we'll do the same with NoScript.
Thanks for the pointer to #10394.
Separate ruleset updates would be #2161, "Allow subscription to external rule feeds"? Have you considered punting on that... I'm obviously biased because my niche use case is a completely stateless Tor Browser, and ruleset changes between releases would mean I'd have to write yet another standalone updater (welp) to avoid the fingerprinting issue. But the ticket also hasn't been modified in 3 years.
So, I think I am not a fan of having the option to subscribe to several external rule feeds. What is going to happen, though, is something outlined in https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/2161#comment:5. However, I think having an option to disable the ruleset updates relying only on the updates that happen via new HTTPS-Everywhere releases does not seem to be unreasonable to me (for a bunch of use-cases). I'll bring that up with the EFF folks and will argue for adding such an option (if it is not already implemented).
Georg