Re: Helping ensure privacy + security

On 10/22/15 10:18 PM, Chris Antaki wrote:
>> We could make that per-site UI easier. Bug 1186948 would make per-site
>> enumeration opt-in easier by hiding click-to-play ("Ask to Activate")
>> plugins from websites enumerating navigator.plugins until the user
>> clicks the click-to-play button.
>
> If the plugin was hidden on pageload, prior to click-to-play, is it possible many sites would still break in the same way?

Sites would break, but the patch in bug 1186948 would show Firefox's 
click-to-play notification. If the user allowed the plugin, Firefox 
would refresh the page and then expose the plugin in navigator.plugins 
so the site could properly detect it.


> Also, to take a step back, I have some questions about the 'plugins.enumerable_names' feature. For the 2,199+ people who were using my plugin, which prevented plugin & mimetype enumeration entirely by setting the value to "", do you think their decision to accept poorly written JavaScript to break, as it does, was valid? Do you think they should be able to make that decision, assuming they might value their privacy over the functionality of some websites?

I suspect that many of your users didn't use sites that required plugins 
other than Flash or Silverlight (which were whitelisted in 
plugins.enumerable_names). Your add-on would effectively make all other 
plugins undetectable, as if they had been disabled in the Add-ons 
Manager. Actually, installing your add-on is easier than manually 
disabling each plugin one by one. :-)