1387695 - Permission prompt doesn't recognize related domains

Status: NEW

(WebExtensions :: General, defect, P3)

Description

[Wladimir Palant]

Google Search link fix (https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/google-search-link-fix/) requires access to 200 domains. Chrome will sum up them as "all google.com domains, all yandex.com domains and all duckduckgo.com domains". Firefox permission prompt on the other hand doesn't recognize these domains as related and only list three of them, mentioning that there are 197 more without any way of showing them.

Comment 1

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

Markus, what do you think?

Comment 2

[Wladimir Palant]

Note that you should test with Google search link fix 1.6.4. As of version 1.6.5, access to all websites is requested on Firefox again - adding a new Google domain in a future update would be quite a disaster otherwise.

Comment 3

[Markus Jaritz [:markus] (UX)]

Looks like Google has a good solution for that.
Forwarding the needinfo to Emanuela as she worked on that.

Comment 4

[Wladimir Palant]

I've found the logic in the Chromium source code here: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/304b1a2730a592bd161577ede2cc4a50bb6b006d/extensions/common/permissions/permission_message_util.cc#36

So there isn't a hardcoded list of Google domains. Instead, multiple domains are generally being collapsed into one entry if they only differ in the RCD (Registry Controlled Domain, this is Public Suffix in Mozilla's terminology) part. For example, with foo.com, foo.net and foo.info in the list, only foo.com is displayed. When choosing which entry to display, Chromium prioritizes .com over .net over .org over everything else.

Note that this logic isn't purely cosmetic. Determining whether one set of permissions is a superset of another will also call GetDistinctHosts(). This means that adding one more google.whatever domain to the extension's privileges won't trigger a permission prompt on update like it does on Firefox right now.

Comment 5

[emanuela [ux]]

Attachment: show-permissions-in-a-second-level-menu.jpg

I can see some security issues in apply Chromium's logic.


I'm wondering if we can doing some slightly different:

- Group together all the related domains 
- Show the full list of domains in a second level menu


If a new domain is added, we still prompt the notifications. If too many new domains are added, we handle in the same way :)