1467145 - Remove LegacyMozTCPSocket?

Status: NEW

(Core :: DOM: Networking, task, P5)

Description

[Alex Gaynor [:Alex_Gaynor]]

https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/dom/network/TCPSocket.h#40 - there's a bunch of code, including some IPC handlers, which appears to exist only to support this.

From some simple grepping, it appears to be unused. :froydnj suggested that it may be the case that we're interested in exposing this to webExtensions in the future, CCing :aswan for feedback on that.

Comment 1

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

We have had bug 1247628 for some time but never made much progress, mostly because there are many things a malicious extension could do with direct access to TCP sockets and we haven't figured out how to present to users a concise description of what such an extension can do that lets them make an informed decision about whether to install the extension or not.

I think you should feel free to remove this, if we come to a point where we want to expose sockets to extensions, we can pull this code out of the repository and make it work again, but there's no point continuing to maintain and ship it just in case.

CCing a couple of other folks who may (or may not) want to weigh in.

Comment 2

[Mike Conca [:mconca]]

Bug 1247628 is in the backlog for WebExtensions, but it is not on the radar for implementation right now. I do believe we will get to it (in some form) eventually, particularly as interest in distributed web protocols keeps growing. I don't know when that will be, but I feel pretty confident saying that Mozilla is unlikely to do anything in 2018.

Comment 3

[Kris Maglione [:kmag]]

I think we're probably going to want this relatively soon, so removing the implementation and letting it bit rot does not seem like a great idea.

Comment 4

[Daniel Stenberg [:bagder]]

Moving to the dom component as the discussed code lies there...