1428583 - [privacy]Disable thumbnails if all open windows are in Private Browsing mode

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: New Tab Page, defect, P2)

Description

[mkkot]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
Build ID: 20171207194519

Steps to reproduce:

Hello,
upon Firefox start on Linux with firejail with options firefox --private-window --safe-mode I can instantly see following connections:

tcp        0      0 192.168.1.2:38214       2.17.157.111:443        ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 192.168.1.2:59480       216.58.209.46:80        ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 192.168.1.2:49582       216.58.209.46:443       ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 192.168.1.2:36582       2.22.52.82:80           ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 192.168.1.2:60996       216.58.209.40:443       ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 192.168.1.2:51464       216.58.209.35:443       ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 192.168.1.2:43974       34.249.129.167:443      ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 192.168.1.2:40202       34.216.156.21:443       ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 192.168.1.2:38218       2.17.157.111:443        ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 192.168.1.2:38216       2.17.157.111:443        ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 192.168.1.2:35122       216.58.209.36:443       ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 192.168.1.2:33858       216.58.209.45:443       ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 192.168.1.2:38558       173.194.220.157:443     ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 192.168.1.2:49592       216.58.209.46:443       ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 192.168.1.2:55152       23.37.43.27:80          ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 192.168.1.2:35760       93.184.220.29:80        ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 192.168.1.2:58568       66.117.29.226:443       ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 192.168.1.2:40306       31.13.81.13:443         ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 192.168.1.2:49178       46.51.195.203:443       ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 192.168.1.2:59456       216.58.209.46:80        ESTABLISHED

Those connections are google servers, amazon servers, akamai and... facebook. The page I'm loading at firefox start is about:blank.

I can understand that there are many legitimate reasons why Firefox might want to connect these servers, among them https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7cvx8c/why_firefox_is_connecting_on_facebook_at_launch/ and https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making-automatic-connections

Anyway, I believe that since Firefox is focused on privacy, you should inform your users upon first start about all of these features and give them easy choice to opt out of them. I was really astonished when I discovered all those connections and I'm not so newbie user. I was sure Firefox is connecting only to Mozilla's owned servers. Now you let me down.



Actual results:

Firefox connects to google, amazon, akamai and facebook upon start in private and safe mode. I can disable those connections but I need to spend half of my day on reading what else could be the reason for unwanted connection and make many experiments to be sure I got rid of them.


Expected results:

User should be informed on first start about these features and should be left with choice. There should be also separate page in Options to disable these connections. You should inform users on which external cloud servers each of these features is hosted. That would be fair approach. Please, don't decide for us.

Comment 1

[Andrei Oprea [:andreio]]

Looks like PageThumbs checks for private mode only to decide if it should store the thumbnail or not.
https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/03877052c151a8f062eea177f684a2743cd7b1d5/toolkit/components/thumbnails/PageThumbs.jsm#223-224

Maybe we should check private mode here as well https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/03877052c151a8f062eea177f684a2743cd7b1d5/toolkit/components/thumbnails/BackgroundPageThumbs.jsm#107

Comment 2

[Luke Crouch [:groovecoder]]

Moving to Activity Streams component and marking as P1 since this opens private browsing users up to online tracking even if they have Tracking Protection enabled or run anti-tracking add-ons.

Comment 3

[GitHub Bugzilla PR Linker]

Attachment: Link to GitHub pull-request: https://github.com/mozilla/activity-stream/pull/3945

Comment 4

[Tanvi Vyas[:tanvi]]

Are thumbnails fetched through the thumbnail service from about:newtab?  Or are thumbnails fetched in a new way for activity stream?

When thumbnails are fetched, do the fetches include cookies?  Which cookies?  Are thumbnail fetches keyed with a specific Origin Attribute for cookie isolation?

Comment 5

[[github robot]]

Commits pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/activity-stream

https://github.com/mozilla/activity-stream/commit/342950c1eeca0c2be518f45ba472be973a3c8c9a
Fix Bug 1428583 - Disable thumbnails if all open windows are in Private Browsing mode

https://github.com/mozilla/activity-stream/commit/296ad1aee1e0db01cc8365fa4387e07ff9a0fb3f
Fix Bug 1428583 - Disable thumbnails if all open windows are in Private Browsing mode

https://github.com/mozilla/activity-stream/commit/1915564f808c55891b2d277ecba5d1667cd968a3
Merge pull request #3945 from sarracini/bug_1428583

Fix Bug 1428583 - Disable thumbnails if all open windows are in Private Browsing mode

Comment 6

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

The thumbnails are fetched with the background page thumbs called from activity stream service. The thumbnails are requested with various flags including anonymous:

https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/components/thumbnails/content/backgroundPageThumbsContent.js#42-50

Comment 7

[Tanvi Vyas[:tanvi]]

When I visit private browsing mode, I don't get the activity stream page on newtab.  I get the purple private browsing window page that talks about what private browsing mode is.  Is this changing?  Needinfo'ing Ed to see if he knows.

I need to take a second look at previous bugs about this.  In the past the LOAD_ANONYMOUS flag wasn't sufficient (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1279568#c14).  But perhaps that is fixed.  Keeping my needinfo to take a look at this.  Past bugs: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1279568
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1309699

Also, the fix in the previous bugs was put behind a pref that is not on by default.

Comment 8

[Andrei Oprea [:andreio]]

> When I visit private browsing mode, I don't get the activity stream page on newtab. 

this behavior is not changing but clicking the home button or typing in the URL takes you to AS.

Comment 9

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/97b3915d56c4

Comment 10

[Tanvi Vyas[:tanvi]]

Removing my needinfo here from comment 7. I believe the new tab page now uses its own cookie jar/container -
https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/8d78f219702286c873860f39f9ed78bad1a6d062/browser/app/profile/firefox.js#1621