1331486 - Ability to add and remove URLs from tracking protection

Status: NEW

(WebExtensions :: Request Handling, defect, P5)

Description

[Andy McKay]

It would be great if a WebExtension could add more URLs to tracking protection. It could also remove them, but only if they were added by the WebExtension themselves. I think this would be great for our ad blocking and privacy add-ons.

Just "adding a URL to tracking protection" is a naively simple statement, so I'll let Francois expand on that, maybe point to an API we could use... or have to build one.

Comment 1

[François Marier [:francois]]

(In reply to Andy McKay [:andym] from comment #0)
> Just "adding a URL to tracking protection" is a naively simple statement, so
> I'll let Francois expand on that, maybe point to an API we could use... or
> have to build one.

We don't have an easy way to inject URLs into the URL Classifier, so we'd have to build a new API for it.

Christoph and I prototyped that in this patchset and add-on:

https://bitbucket.org/fmarier/mozilla-central-mq-content-blocking/src
https://github.com/fmarier/urlclassifier-webextension

Comment 2

[Andy McKay]

Luke, you did some work on this with your Tracking Protection add-on, would this have helped? What kind of API would you have liked?

Comment 3

[Luke Crouch [:groovecoder]]

Hmm ... I only did origins - not full URLs. I just used browser.storage.local.set({allowedHosts: });

If I were to extrapolate a more general-purpose private-browsing list, it might start with a new browser.privacy.services.privateBrowsingAllowedHosts object?

browser.privacy.services.privateBrowsingAllowedHosts (returns array or object)
browser.privacy.services.privateBrowsingAllowedHosts.add(host);
browser.privacy.services.privateBrowsingAllowedHosts.remove(host);

?