[tor-bugs] #5273 [Firefox Patch Issues]: Update TBB design doc for 2.3.x-alpha

Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki torproject-admin at torproject.org
Wed Jul 18 23:37:25 UTC 2012


#5273: Update TBB design doc for 2.3.x-alpha
----------------------------------+-----------------------------------------
 Reporter:  mikeperry             |          Owner:  mikeperry                    
     Type:  defect                |         Status:  new                          
 Priority:  major                 |      Milestone:  TorBrowserBundle 2.3.x-stable
Component:  Firefox Patch Issues  |        Version:                               
 Keywords:  MikePerry201207       |         Parent:                               
   Points:                        |   Actualpoints:                               
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Comment(by mikeperry):

 Replying to [comment:18 gk]:
 > > I also expect that certain sites will have homogenous requirements wrt
 ad blockers and plugins/media because people will naturally decide that
 those sites suck in similar ways... But perhaps that is a poor assumption?
 If so, please explain how/why?
 >
 > Don't know yet as I am not sure whether I understand you correctly. What
 do you mean with "homogenous requirements wrt ad blockers and
 plugins/media" and how does this fit to the issue whether site-based
 options for adblockers etc. or no options at all should be implemented in
 the default TBB?

 Well, I think certain sites are going to cause similar choices by the
 userbase. Consider YouTube. Clicking through the barriers for every video
 there is annoying (and sometimes breaks random videos), but disabling the
 clickthroughs globally is a fingerprinting vector and also a large
 security risk. Similar situations exist for adblockers... Some sites have
 obnoxious advertising and rather than let this drive users to install
 Adblock Plus for *all* sites, we can provide them with a permission for
 the specific site that annoys them...

 However, both of those points assumes that the majority of the userbase
 will successfully navigate the Privacy UI...

 Wrt to the Beggar's Header, I am very tempted to remove it from the Tor
 Browser UI entirely.. As a compromise, I was toying with the idea of
 removing it from the usual location but providing the per-site context
 menu... But yeah, perhaps we don't give a damn about providing even that,
 and should just go out of our way to kill the stupid thing.

 > > As a general matter, I prefer allowing user choice if possible, but it
 also seems clear that user choice for global behaviors is really, really
 bad... Allowing easy access to per-site choices would be way better by
 comparison...
 >
 > Choice is good but do users really want to have per site choices
 regarding ad-trackers and DNT? What makes you believe so? And why does
 that not already exist as an add-on and all anti-tracker add-ons are
 working globally (at least all I can currently come up with)? If there is
 even a tiny demand for a specific wish there usually seems to exist an
 add-on for it on AMO.

 Yeah, that's exactly the scenario I want to avoid. We should add
 warnings/text in the addon store UI that tells the user that addons can
 harm privacy and anonymity... Since Adblock Plus is the most popular addon
 in the world, supporting some form of user choice per-site might be a
 decent compromise? It might prevent the userbase from fragmenting itself
 globally.. It's a tricky tradeoff, though.


 At any rate, the key thing I want to communicate with the context menu is
 that all of the global privacy options that alter browser behavior need to
 be in a per-site menu (if they exist at all), rather than global choices.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/5273#comment:19>
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