2017376 - Unified Trust Panel slider for Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) has no effect (i.e. doesn't remember its state) for security/network error pages and other `about:` pages, as well as file:/// URLs

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P3)

Description

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

STR:

1. Visit a site that makes Firefox show a network-error or security-error page, e.g. https://expired.badssl.com/ or https://self-signed.badssl.com/
2. Click the shield icon at the left side of the URL bar to show the unified trust panel.
3. Notice that the only actionable thing you can do there is to toggle the Enhanced Tracking Protection slider. Try toggling that.
4. Refresh the page and repeat step 2.

ACTUAL RESULTS:
Toggling the slider makes it visually move, but it has no effect and it doesn't persist through a reload. Additionally, if you have the Browser Console open, then this error appears when you toggle the slider:

Uncaught NS_ERROR_ILLEGAL_VALUE: Component returned failure code: 0x80070057 (NS_ERROR_ILLEGAL_VALUE) [nsIPermissionManager.addFromPrincipal]
add resource://gre/modules/ContentBlockingAllowList.sys.mjs:82
    #toggleTrackingProtection chrome://browser/content/browser-trustPanel.js:670
    initializePopup chrome://browser/content/browser-trustPanel.js:263
[...]

EXPECTED RESULTS:
We should either hide the ETP slider on network error pages; OR, we should make it actually take effect (even though it won't fix the real network/security error that's making us hit the error page) -- i.e. the user's chosen on/off value should be remembered across a reload.

Comment 1

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

I see the same issue for Firefox-internal pages (about:addons and about:preferences), too -- we show an ETP slider in the Unified Trust Panel for those pages, and it has no effect when I click it (the setting I chose isn't remembered, and Browser Console shows the same NS_ERROR_ILLEGAL_VALUE that I quoted in comment 0).

Comment 2

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Attachment: Reference screenshot from Firefox 147 release, showing internal Firefox page, with no ETP slider (good)

For comparison, Firefox release 147 doesn't offer any ETP slider at all in the pop-up panel (which makes sense to me), for network error pages (as shown in a screenshot I posted on another bug and for Firefox internal pages like about:preferences per the screenshot that I'm attaching here.

Comment 3

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

This affects file:// URLs, too -- same results there.

I've got a screenshot of a file URI's unified-trust-panel popup in https://bug2017386.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=9545828 for bug 2017386 -- that screenshot has an arrow pointing at a different thing (the "local file" label) -- but for the purposes of this bug here, you can see the [useless] ETP slider-widget lower down in that screenshot, too.

Comment 4

[Dale Harvey (:daleharvey)]

We should either hide the ETP slider on network error pages; OR, we should make it actually take effect (even though it won't fix the real network/security error that's making us hit the error page) -- i.e. the user's chosen on/off value should be remembered across a reload.

We used to disabled this section when ContentBlockingAllowList.canHandle returned false, however that seems to have been lost, trying to figure out whether I am misremembering or we lost the code for that somehow

Comment 5

[Dale Harvey (:daleharvey)]

Attachment: Bug 2017376 - Disable tracking protection toggle when not applicable. r=daisuke

Comment 6

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/commit/a6355c925e86
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/65ec7785a07c
Disable tracking protection toggle when not applicable. r=daisuke,urlbar-reviewers

Comment 7

[Serban Stanca [:SerbanS]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/65ec7785a07c