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by sterlind 10 days ago
first off, thank you for your service.

second, would it be possible to make RFP appear as an extension like uBO, where it suggests sites to allow-list, or hints that the page might be broken and asks if you want to disable RFP?

I'm more tech savvy than the average user, admittedly, but I've learned this pattern for uBO.

1 comments

For a time RFP - by itself - could be enabled by web extensions. (It might still be possible, I don't recall if we removed it.) But it's a footgun because it became even easier for people to enable it by accident.

I can point you at a few things you could do if you wanted to pursue this:

1) We have a dev extension https://github.com/mozilla-extensions/fingerprinting-protect... that lets you enable/disable individual fingerprinting protections. We use to debug why something is broken.

2) granularOverrides allows you to enable/disable individual protections for a given website.

If you wanted this, you could go read https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FywogzvkWupoUoz4PcCp9nNd... ; then made an extension that made it easy to edit granular overrides (you couldn't directly set the preference, but you could produce the json you could copy/paste into the pref). You could do stuff with lists if you want. (Somewhere there was a FF fork that had a pretty impressive granularoverride list itself...) You'll be in this awkward spot where you don't have all the permissions to do what you want to do directly, but you can get yourself about.... 40 - 60% of the way there?

I would like to find a way to support power users while not making the problem worse (In https://ritter.vg/blog-telemetry.html I describe that the 'confused users think FF is broken' problem got so bad management wanted to just disable RFP entirely, but I was able to show that these users are a very vocal minority and the problem is not as bad as it seems) while also not giving myself a maintenance burden but... maybe there a path forward where this dev extension - that can do things normal extensions can't - could potentially get more functionality...?