Think high sensitivity sites like banking. Personally, I'd love to be able to flag sites as only having a limited whitelisted set of extensions, as they are a serious potential security risk. And I'm fine with the browser shipping with sane defaults. I don't want to have to manually tune this for my family members.

Come to think of it, even better would be to attach this feature to whole containers...

I understand this position, but I do see several trackers ("telemetry") get blocked by uBlock on my bank's website.

This type of telemetry can go die in a fire for all I'm concerned, but these trackers are particularly devious with their constantly changing domains and URLs. Addons that allow for things like regex matching are the only solution that seems to work because the Pihole blacklist doesn't seem to block them sufficiently.

Mozilla has already killed off malicious addons by enforcing their signature requirements. I'm not sure what this adds, I doubt Mozilla will hire someone to monitor the changes to banking URLs around the world (a necessity if this is indeed intended to make banking safer).

* * *

They've nipped the crap inserted by adware in the bud. Sure, anyone who can pass a simple malware scan can get an addon published, but there's no doubt in my mind that getting rid of unsigned addons has helped a lot.

> I understand this position, but I do see several trackers ("telemetry") get blocked by uBlock on my bank's website.

Which is why I'd leave uBlock whitelisted. I never said I want to block all extensions!

> I doubt Mozilla will hire someone to monitor the changes to banking URLs around the world

uBlock effectively does this for advertising domains. Why is that any different?

The tricky thing is what extensions should be whitelisted and what extensions shouldn't. uBlock is easy, but what about Consent-O-Matic? What about GreaseMonkey and friends? What about Stylus? Where do you draw the line?

uBlock was just an example, of course. There are other addons that do more complex auto detection.

In my experience, banking websites are notoriously ass-backwards and need more hacks and patches than many other websites.

I’ve specifically used Greasemonkey to fix bank breaking pasting into fields and blocking password managers by splitting login form into deliberately broken pieces.

That's what incognito is for. And what you should use regardless

What? No. I've never used incognito mode for that purpose. I still want my banking site to be able to, for example, drop persistent cookies (for example, to indicate I'm comfortable bypassing two factor on that device).

When I went looking into this feature I saw they're developing a negative permissions list for addons, so you can create exceptions for i.e ublock or dark reader or whatever for specific websites, disallowing them to access your data on that page.

Okay? You have "malicious" extension. Why would you allow it to run everyhere ?

What would just limiting the "fix" of blocking it to inevitably only some set of US banks (as I doubht they get the all URLs to every bank in the world) achieve?

It's not about known malicious extensions, it's about known trusted extensions.

Are you really not understanding this threat model?

There is no such thing as a "known trusted extension" ever since they killed sideloading extensions and forced auto-updates. 10 years ago not force updating extensions was also a thing they moved behind a flag, and then just dropped.

Also - if you want to blacklist certain extensions from certain sites, you abso-freaking-lutely can already... see: https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/master/READ...

you want the `restricted_domains` field.

It gets worse - Mozilla is the fucking worst at checking submitted extensions. They tried to the play into the whole "app store" thing that Google/Apple were doing, but those are justifiable cost centers at those two companies in a way that just doesn't work for a player like Mozilla.

Mozilla's store checks for extensions are fairly pathetic. You can submit a near empty shell with excessive permissions, get approved the first time, then auto-update to a new release (which will deploy to users immediately thanks to auto-updates). That new version has to pass a battery of useless automatic SAST checks, which will happily highlight all sorts of things it doesn't like (it flags words like "hello" because it contains a curse word) but which won't do shit to check if you're hoovering up credentials, browsing data, tracking users, etc.

If you're unlucky, at some point in the next 24 months you'll trigger a real review from Mozilla and get caught.

To be blunt - I have 15 years experience writing extensions. I don't like Google. If you think Mozilla is better you're wrong.

Hmm, I thought I understood until your comment here. It being about known trusted extensions makes no sense to me -- so I guess I'm not understanding the threat model at all.

If an extension is known and trusted, why does there need to be a Mozilla-controlled kill switch for it?

It's the reverse. The purpose of the feature is to put known trusted extensions on a whitelist for sensitive sites while blacklisting everything else.

In my case I'd put uBlock on my "yes I trust this extension" list and when I visit my banking website only that extension would be active.

It's also not "Mozilla-controlled". It's a feature that will, in the future, come with sensible defaults, just as uBlock does with their default blocklists, but in 116 the user will be able to more fully configure the feature. Meanwhile, in 115 the feature isn't active by default because the extension whitelist and domain list are empty.

How do they know what sites I consider sensitive?

How do they establish trust for an extension?

How many dollars do you want to wager that they are building this feature with the intent to get sued so that they can be forced by the courts to turn it on for sites like youtube?

> How many dollars do you want to wager that they are building this feature with the intent to get sued so that they can be forced by the courts to turn it on for sites like youtube?

Good god, the conspiracy theories are next level with this one...

Ah, I get it. Thank you.

> It's also not "Mozilla-controlled".

It's not? The bugzilla entry at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1832791 says

    We need to have ability to set the list of 
    quarantined domains remotely.

Which sounds pretty Mozilla-controlled to me. I hope that Mozilla will allow reasonable user control over all of this. I'm aware of their stated plans, but until we don't know what will be until they actually implement them.

Actually iff it's user-controlled I'd love such a feature. As sibling comment notes, it'd be nice to have zero extensions (or maybe just uBo) running on sensitive sites like a bank, but I'd actually be more interested in running certain extensions only on select sites; ex. there are extensions to force videos to play at arbitrary speeds that I like for video sites, but I want to only let those extensions run on a very short list of sites (youtube, netflix, w/e) and nowhere else.

Why "security problem"? The wording is telling:

> ...for various reasons, including security concerns.

Security is just a red herring.

Who wins with this move? The cynic in me (who is usually annoyingly right) says Google. Mozilla loses even more trust from its users and Firefox now has a tool to disable ad blockers on websites of their biggest competitor^Wsponsor if they reach a suitable mutual agreement (read: G pays enough for it). Win-win for all the parties that have a say in this. Not users of course, but that's life.

> ...for various reasons, including security concerns.

Yes, this is what got my spidey-sense tingling, too.