Re: Helping ensure privacy + security

On 10/23/15 12:11 PM, Chris Antaki wrote:
>> >Your add-on would effectively make all other plugins undetectable, as if they had been disabled in the Add-ons Manager.
> Well, wasn't my plugin just preventing enumeration of the `navigator.mimeTypes` and `navigator.plugins` objects? My understanding was that the plugins could still be queried for directly, which would be a more efficient method O(1), and more respectful of user privacy.

The plugins can still be queried directly, but convincing each and every 
website to rewrite their plugin detection code is a "boil the ocean" 
problem. It's never going to be complete and there will always be 
unmaintained websites that expect a plugin but won't work in Firefox.

Support for all NPAPI plugins (except Flash) will be removed next year, 
so plugin fingerprinting will no longer be a problem. (However, 
fingerprinting system fonts using Flash will still be a problem.)

https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/10/08/npapi-plugins-in-firefox/