1712361 - Persist local storage setting lost across restart

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Site Permissions, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Peter L Jones]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:90.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/90.0

Steps to reproduce:

This initially started happening around the time I upgraded to Nightly 90.0a1 2021-05-17 64bit, along with #1711557 and #1711559

Steps to reproduce:

Open a site that requests local storage
(for example https://messages.google.com/web/conversations/21 )

Block the request

Exit Firefox

Start Firefox and access the site again

Actual results:

The site opens and requests local storage again.

Expected results:

The denial of local storage should have persisted.

Comment 1

[Daniel Bodea [:danibodea]]

The local storage door-hanger has only 2 options now: "Allow" will let the corresponding app use local storage forever (not temporarily) and "Block" will TEMPORARILY block the use of local storage for the corresponding app. This door hanger did previously have a "Remember this decision" checkbox, which would allow the user the option to never let the app use local storage.
Firefox ESR v78.10.1esr local storage permission door-hanger has the option to "Never Allow", but all the other latest version of the Nightly, Beta and Release channels do not.

Upon investigating the introduction of this change, it appears it was intentionally implemented with:
Bug 1697903 - Remove Remember this decision checkbox from Persistent Storage panel. r=johannh
Differential Revision: https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D108091

Furthermore, while attempting to find how a user would be able to block local storage I have discovered that if you go to the browser's preferences, Privacy & Security tab, Cookies and Site Data section and click on the "Manage Exceptions..." button, you could add the https://messages.google.com as "Blocked" to the list, in which case, the web-app is not even usable anymore.

Considering the fact that I am not sure how a user is able to (not just temporarily) block the use of local storage of a webapp or if it even makes sense to do so, I will confirm this bug as an enhancement and let DEV team comment on it.

Comment 2

[Emma Zühlcke [:emz]]

Thanks for the great summary!

You can still set a persistent deny for the permission via the permissions section via the "Permissions" tab in the "Page Info" window. In the row labeled "Store data in persistent storage" uncheck "Use Default" and select the "Block" radio button on the right.

Johann, do you think we should switch to a persistent deny when users select "block"? This means if users select "block" they'd have to revoke the blocked permission in order to see the prompt again.

Comment 3

[Johann Hofmann [:johannh]]

Yeah I wouldn't be opposed to that.