1420405 - allow extensions to open the default new tab page (about:newtab)

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(WebExtensions :: General, defect, P5)

Description

[Col]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
Build ID: 20171027085204

Steps to reproduce:

Allow tabs.create, update, etc to open about:newtab. We don't need to pass anchor or query strings.

As requested in as requested in bug 1269456.

Use case is that the default newtab page is useful and extensions maybe want to expose it even if they override it.

This has already been discussed in bug 1371793 (where Andy said "Seems reasonable to me") and in bug 1411647.

Can we just get a quick security review and land this already?

Comment 1

[Adrian [freundTech]]

Additional info:
According to the API documentation (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/tabs/update) about:newtab should be a non-privileged URL, so it should be possible to open it with tabs.create and update.
I tested it in both Firefox 57.0.1 and 59.0a1 (nightly) and in both it was treated as a privileged URL.

Comment 2

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

(In reply to Adrian [freundTech] from comment #1)
> Additional info:
> According to the API documentation
> (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/tabs/update)
> about:newtab should be a non-privileged URL, so it should be possible to
> open it with tabs.create and update.
> I tested it in both Firefox 57.0.1 and 59.0a1 (nightly) and in both it was
> treated as a privileged URL.

It looks like at the time that documentation was written, about:newtab was unprivileged, but it became privileged as part of the activity stream project.  I've updated the documentation.

Comment 3

[lmlb_lmlb]

This would be useful with the "Do Not Auto Activate Pinned Tabs" extension (so I can configure it to open about:newtab).