1434934 - Get rid of dom.workers.enabled pref

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, enhancement, P2)

Description

[Andrea Marchesini [:baku]]

Worker should be always enabled.

Comment 1

[Andrea Marchesini [:baku]]

Attachment: pref.patch

Comment 2

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/4191749c2609
Remove dom.workers.enabled pref, r=bkelly

Comment 3

[Raul Gurzau (:RaulG)]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/4191749c2609

Comment 4

[Chris Mills [:cmills]]

Probably not *really* worth mentioning, but I've added a small note anyway:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Releases/60#DOM

Comment 5

[KOLANICH]

I vote against this proposal.

Comment 6

[Thorin [:thorin]]

Can someone please explain the REASONS WHY "Worker should be always enabled" as per comment 1 . Is it some technical reason / code simplification, or some arbitrary decision that workers are becoming more mainstream and the wider public is not allowed to "break" things? Being able to disable workers is a valid privacy mechanism.

Comment 7

[Ben Kelly [:bkelly, not reviewing]]

Disabling workers is not a privacy enhancing change.  I don't know why people have that impression.  Dedicated and shared workers only live as long as there is a window opened to the given origin.  Service workers can run in the background if you grant push notifications, etc, but we still have a pref to disable service workers and we disable them depending on various privacy options set by the user.

Its not feasible to disable workers completely in firefox because the browser itself depends on them.

Comment 8

[Eli Grey (:sephr)]

> Disabling workers is not a privacy enhancing change.  I don't know why people have that impression.

Worker SAB was the initial timing intrinsic used to run Spectre in browsers, and some people may be wary of additional timing intrinsics that have yet to be discovered or disclosed. I don't feel strongly about this issue, although I disagree with your statement about privacy. Disabling workers decreases attack surface, increasing security and, by extension, privacy.