1579264 - GeckoSessionSettings.setUseTrackingProtection is misleading

Status: NEW

(GeckoView :: General, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Arturo Mejia [:amejia]]

As discussed with Dylan over slack every time that we set GeckoSessionSettings.setUseTrackingProtection to true we are not only activating tracking protection as the docs suggest. When set to true is also blocking scripts/sub-resources even though we are not specifying it under the antiTracking categories

Comment 1

[Dylan Roeh (:droeh) (he/him)]

To elaborate a bit: the functionality here can't really be changed much without buy-in from someone working on TP in Gecko. TP/ETP works by setting black-lists to a pref and then either (a) enabling docShell.useTrackingProtection for content blocking (TP), or (b) setting cookie behavior to ACCEPT_NON_TRACKER.

What could possibly changed is some of the (imo) extremely confusing naming here: to give some obvious examples,

• GeckoSessionSettings.useTrackingProtection could be interpreted to mean it controls "Tracking Protection" in the sense of blocking content (which is still how it gets used sometimes, at least internally in Gecko), or to mean it controls the broader family of "Tracking Protection" features.
• The AntiTracking.SOCIAL list can far-too-easily be confused with "Social Tracking Protection" (which in reality is an entirely different feature controlled by different prefs in Gecko.)
• The AntiTracking.CONTENT list can far-too-easily be confused with content blocking, when in reality it's simply another list of trackers -- you can block cookies or content as you choose from this list.

At the moment, my plan is to welcome Eugen back in a few weeks by campaigning to have one of us take on an attempt at updating this API to make it much clearer, ideally with some support from the Gecko side of things.

Comment 2

[Arturo Mejia [:amejia]]

@droeh please include me in the meeting to update the tracking protection API, I'm will be glad to help!

Comment 3

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

There's not much GV can do because GV's names are caught between Gecko's TP terminology in code and Firefox/Fenix's TP terminology in the UI.

Dylan will talk with Eugen.

Comment 4

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The bug assignee didn't login in Bugzilla in the last 7 months.
:amoya, could you have a look please?
For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 5

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Move GeckoView::Tracking Protection bugs to the GeckoView::General component.

Comment 6

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Arturo, is this three-year-old bug about

Comment 7

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Tasks and enhancements should have severity N/A.