Extension request for Private Browsing for vulnerable individuals.
Philip Clarke
I'm asking the community to quickly hack an extension to initiate
private browsing if it detects a server sending a header
X-privacy: Private
I had this idea that for websites that report crime or child abuse,
anonymity is extremely important and a lot of people don't have a clue
to start up a Private Browsing session themselves, so I came up with
this idea yesterday and have submitted it to all the browser
manufacturers starting here:
http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.apps.firefox/browse_thread/thread/22ed0734bae0bedf#
So far the only people to have responded are the webkit developers
forming the basis of Safari and Chrome (and KHTML and probably others).
This morning I have had a look at firefox extension development and done
the "hello world" example and then have taken the liveHttPHeaders
extension to pieces to have a look. I know javascript only in the
context of web pages and quite frankly it's time to hand over to the
experts. What I would like is an extension "X-privacy" that does the
above, I cannot work out from the MDN documentation whether
nsIHttpChannel.getRequestMethod() is available before the document is
loaded or whatever and I also don't know the version compatibility that
you guys would have stored in your heads.
What I'd like to do is handover the development of an X-privacy module
to you, while I use my time to harangue the manufacturers to implement
this as a browser feature. I've registered the domain X-privacy and will
put up test pages when the DNS updates over the next 48 hours.
.
A better use of my time (rather than hammering my head against a brick
wall developing) will also be approaching all the UK charities and
police forces to implement the header on their reporting websites, when
the extension is done then I can contact all the magazines saying "look
this is a great stop gap that the community did" and then re-contact the
charities to recommend the download of the extension. I would expect
version 0.1 to just read
X-privacy: Private
and initiate a private browsing session. I would expect version 0.2 to
ask the user if they want to open a private session when the website
sends the header
X-privacy: Optional
and then there's some added complexity as to whether it's possible that
if someone receives an X-privacy header half way through surfing a site,
whether the cookies downloaded from that site can be deleted after the
fact and also the browser history prior to spawning a Private Browsing
session.
I do have a declared interest in this, I'm building a website about
divorce, I'd prefer not to go into personal details about why I think
this header is important.
Thank you.
foudfou
It wasn't as trivial as I had thought, andI came across the following problems:
- handle switching back to normal browsing (with multiple tabs/windows)
- display the requested x-private site in the new private session
I hadn't time to implement some popup before/notification(box?) after switching.
I'll working on it from time to time, so if anyone is interested, I don't mind passing it over.