933548 - Add-on should be able to open private windows / tabs

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Add-on SDK Graveyard :: General, defect, P3)

Description

[Irakli Gozalishvili [:irakli] [:gozala] [@gozala]]

At the moment if add-on does something like `windows.open({ isPrivate: true, ... })` we still open non-private window unless add-on has opted-in to private browsing.

I do think this is ideal for following reasons:

1. Main intent of hiding private windows from the add-ons that did not opt-in
   was to avoid violation of privacy by existing add-ons. Although if add-on
   explicitly requests to open private window, that's good enough opt-in IMO.
   Also in such case private window still won't be in the listing or will be
   traceable using event emitters.
2. If add-on opens private window that does not necessary means it's going to
   do stuff with it. In fact it may completely ignore it.

Comment 1

[Jeff Griffiths (:canuckistani) (:⚡︎)]

What's the use case of this? IMO we throw an exception in this case - it shouldn't be allowed, this is what private browsing permissions are for.

Comment 2

[Irakli Gozalishvili [:irakli] [:gozala] [@gozala]]

I don't have specific example, but it seems like a most logical choice to me. We never said add-on should not be able to interact with private windows, we said add-on needs to opt-in to make sure it knows what
it's doing. It feels to me that passing very specific option clearly indicates add-on knows what it's doing.

There is also another issue with current approach, which is you get all or nothing. If add-on just want's to open private windows it needs to handle all of them too, that's not ideal. I think we should let add-on
decide weather it wants to open private windows separate from weather it wants to track private windows.

As a side benefit this would also make our code more comprehendable, cause now it's just too many
invariants that confused hell out of me :)

Comment 3

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1399562