1559703 - It would be nice to allow an extension to work only in one container

Status: NEW

(WebExtensions :: General, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Szymon Lipiński]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0

Steps to reproduce:

There are some extensions, which I'd like to use, which want to have access to all my tabs or page content. I'd like to be able to say that this extension can be run inside this one container. This way the read-all-tabs permission would mean reading only the tabs opened inside this one container.

Comment 1

[Adrian Florinescu [:aflorinescu]]

Thank you for the enhancement request, it does seem an interesting idea. Let's tentatively triage this, so it can be looked upon.

Comment 2

[Rob Wu [:robwu]]

Sounds like a good feature to me, asking product for opinion and priority.

Comment 3

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][☁️📆]]

Thanks for the report. I can see how this would be useful and improves security and will check with the team how they feel as well. I believe there would be considerable effort involved in making this happen so I am putting this on our backlog for now and will see how it fits into planning.

Comment 4

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][☁️📆]]

On second thought, I think going the path of bug 1497075 might make more sense. Associating this with containers is a great idea, but looking at what you want to achieve (add-on only has access to certain pages/tabs) using host permissions is more in line with the direction WebExtensions area heading. Let me know if there is a use case I missed, thanks so much for the report!

Comment 5

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][☁️📆]]

Making this a see also instead as per request, so we can reconsider when host permissions are implemented. It might fit in quite well with the UX we have for that, but I'd like to focus on host permissions first.

Comment 6

[Shane Caraveo (:mixedpuppy)]

I don't think this is related to host permissions, nor could you gain the same effect since any 'host' could be in tabs in multiple containers.

This idea had been talked about when I was working on the incognito feature. I thought I had a bug for it but cannot locate it right now. Basically, you'd be able to limit any extension to a specific container, much like enabling/disabling private browsing for an extension. You could then e.g. disable all extensions in your Banking container, or enable a coupon addon only in the Shopping container.

Much of the work done to support incognito/private browsing permission lays some groundwork for this, or at least provides a guide to where changes would need to be done to enforce this kind of restriction.

Comment 7

[Gingerbread Man]

This looks like a duplicate of bug 1365019.

Comment 8

[Rob Wu [:robwu]]

I've marked this bug as a dependency instead of a duplicate, because the feature can only be implemented if our extension framework supports this level of isolation, so at least a part of the work has to be tracked in the WebExtensions component.