1919691 - Add webassembly to Settings -> Privacy & Security

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Settings UI, enhancement)

Description

[taoberly]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/115.0

Steps to reproduce:

I have been browsing with webassembly disabled for quite some time and with no ill effects because I'm not playing online games, performing online video editing, etc., i.e. not partaking in the original use cases. Over the last two months I've begun encountering traditional hypertext sites (all text and forms) that are bootstrapping their site code with webassembly, apparently in the interest of security. I would still prefer to browse with webassembly off, and the best solution I can think of is an Enable/Disable/Ask/Exceptions or similar feature in the Settings GUI.

Technically I'm using the latest Waterfox, but that's not relevant.

Actual results:

For two recent examples of sites "sneaking it in" and thus my motivation for visiting Bugzilla see https://www.firstenergycorp.com (JS file with embedded webassembly at https://www.firstenergycorp.com/js/fehnkc1s97yz.js) and https://www.truist.com/ (JS file at https://dias.bank.truist.com/ui/scripts/truist_common.js). The JS files are practically identical so must come from the same source.

Expected results:

I'd like to see a traditional popup that reads

"Allow www.foo.com to run webassembly"

Allow / Block / Remember this decision

If you believe this is too technical for the average user, please at least confirm that the current state of Webextensions would allow a third party to write such an addon. The only existing addon I could find is WebAssembly Detector (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/webassembly-detector/), which is not particularly full-featured.

Comment 1

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

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'WebExtensions::Untriaged' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Ina Popescu, Desktop QA]

Thank you for submitting this enhancement request. Marking it as NEW.