Re: Enhanced Tracking Protection shield button is gone

[Maxim Cournoyer]

Hello Mark,

Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org> writes:

> Hi Maxim,
>
> Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> I've noticed for some time already that the blue shield button [0] that used
>> to be present on the left of the URL bar has vanished in recent versions
>> of IceCat.  That button could be used to whitelist a particular site and
>> disable the builtin tracking protection features of IceCat.
>>
>> Is there a reason for its omission, or is it a bug?
>
> I intentionally hid it, using the following patch:
>
>   
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnuzilla.git/tree/data/patches/hide-protections-dashboard.patch?id=bcfe407570cae32d00dd33a268de0e0593166f7b
>
> The rationale is that in IceCat, a large part of "tracking protection"
> functionality has been disabled, and I did not want to give users a
> false impression by displaying the shield icon.

I see!  It makes sense.  It just felt as if something was missing,
seeing an empty pixel space where the button used to be :-).

> Firefox tracking protection is based on centrally-managed blacklists.
> Before making a network request, Firefox queries servers managed by
> Google and Mozilla to find out whether to block the request, using an
> API based on Google Safe Browsing.  The API is ostensibly designed to
> avoid leaking your browser history to those servers, but I'm skeptical.
>
> In any case, the "Safe Browsing" functionality is intentionally disabled
> in IceCat by default, via changes to the default values of the
> "browser.safebrowsing.*" settings, here:
>
>   
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnuzilla.git/tree/data/settings.js?id=bcfe407570cae32d00dd33a268de0e0593166f7b#n100

Thanks for the explanation, I wasn't aware this was the case, and when
visiting a certain site [0], it seemed it was being blocked by it. "The
resource at
“https://d36jcksde1wxzq.cloudfront.net/main.e8dad13abbe3105c502c.css”
was blocked because content blocking is enabled.".  Perhaps I carried
previous defaults (I've been using IceCat since 2016, with the same
profile I believe), or perhaps it was me playing with the settings in
the about:preferences#privacy area.

Setting the Enhanced Tracking Protection to "Custom" and disabling all
of its blocking features does lift this blocking.

> Ideally, I would like to provide a nice interface to allow users to
> fully enable "tracking protection" if they wish.  The "Enhanced Tracking
> Protection" section of <about:preferences#privacy> should be modified to
> properly support the default IceCat mode (Safe Browsing disabled).  That
> panel is currently somewhat misleading in the IceCat previews, which is
> one of the reasons that these are previews and not official releases.
>
>> There doesn't seem to be a way to whitelist a website from it anymore.
>
> I suspect that the "Manage Exceptions" button in the "Enhanced Tracking
> Protection" section of <about:preferences#privacy> does the same thing,
> albeit less conveniently.

This view only allows *removing* already whitelisted URLs, not adding
new ones; I couldn't find a corresponding whitelist that can be manually
set in the about:config parameters.

Anyway, thank you for your help, I think I could clear much of my
earlier confusion :-).

Happy hacking!

Maxim

[0]  https://hub.docker.com/