1428446 - Whitelist custom protocol handlers for work on decentralization technologies with WebExtensions

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(WebExtensions :: General, enhancement)

Description

[andre]

Decentralization is one of the priorities for a healthier internet. I'd like some protocols related to decentralization be whitelisted so that we're able to work with them from WebExtensions. The ones I'd like to have whitelisted are:

"ssb" for Secure Scuttlebutt communications
"dat" for DATproject
"ipfs", "ipns", "dweb" for IPFS

Those protocols serve no use inside Firefox or the OS that Firefox is running, they pose no risk of shadowing some other tool or hijacking anything. Currently all the decentralization projects are using forks of Electron to support those custom protocols, it would be good if we could whitelist them on Firefox and thus (maybe) be able to be the first major browser with support for those advanced protocols.

I would be happy to work on it and provide a patch to whitelist them.

Comment 1

[andre]

Attachment: Patch that whitelists ssb, dat and ipfs protocols for webextensions

This patch adds "dat", "dweb", "ipfs", "ipns" and "ssb" to the whitelist of custom protocols to be used by WebExtensions. All of them are used by decentralization technologies.

Comment 2

[Shane Caraveo (:mixedpuppy)]

Comment on attachment 8940368 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch that whitelists ssb, dat and ipfs protocols for webextensions

lgtm

Comment 3

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/c2cb8a06bcf1
Add DAT, IPFS, and SSB to the webextension protocol whitelist. r=mixedpuppy

Comment 4

[Eliza Balazs [:ebalazs_]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/c2cb8a06bcf1

Comment 5

[marius.santa]

Is manual testing required on this bug? If Yes, please provide some STR and the proper webextension(if required), if No set the “qe-verify-“ flag.

Comment 6

[andre]

I don't think manual testing is required. This was only an addition to the items in a whitelist which already has been tested. I have set "qe-verify" to "+" to reflect that. I can still provide an add-on if someone feel it is really needed. 

also thanks a lot to Shane and Eliza for pushing this forward with the proper methods. I am new to this.

Comment 7

[marius.santa]

I have set the "qe-verify" to "-" to reflect that no further manual QA testing is required.

Comment 8

[andre]

Oops, got the flags mixed, thought the + was the one that flagged that it required no manual testing. Sorry for the mistake.

Comment 9

[Marcin Rataj]

FYSA, apart from this change to Firefox, WebExtensions will not pass linting or be accepted to AMO unless addons-linter is updated as well. See issue at https://github.com/mozilla/addons-linter/issues/1783

Comment 10

[Will Bamberg [:wbamberg]]

Updated https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/manifest.json/protocol_handlers. Marking as dev-doc-complete, but please let me know if we need anything else.