Privacy/Reviews/New Tab

Document Overview

Feature/Product:	New Tab
Projected Feature Freeze Date:	(tbd)
Product Champions:	Tim Taubert & Asa Dotzler
Privacy Champions:	(the privacy Friend you're working with)
Security Contact:	Curtis Koenig
Document State:	[NEW]

Timeline:

Architectural Overview:	(date TBD)
Recommendation Meeting:	(date TBD)
Review Complete ETA:	tbd

Architecture

In this section, the product's architecture is described. Any individual components or actors are identified, their "knowledge" or what data they store is identified, and data flow between components and external entities is described.

The main objective of this feature/product is:

The New Tab Page will be shown to the user when opening a new tab. It shows up to nine of the user's most visited URLs together with their thumbnails. The user can re-arrange or remove these sites. URLs can be blocked from appearing on the New Tab Page again. Any URL can be dropped onto the grid.

Design Documents:

http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/new-tab-prototype-i03/new-tab-prototype-i03.html

Components

Describe any major components in the system and how they interact. Also include any third-party APIs (those Mozilla does not control) and what type of data is sent or received via those APIs.

Note: All the components listed below are parts of the browser and are not third party services or software.

about:newtab

This is a normal web page that is presented to the user when opening a new tab. It accesses the Places component to retrieve the user's most visited sites and displays them. The thumbnail service is queried to retrieve a thumbnail for the URLs shown on the New Tab Page grid.

Stored Data:

What	Where
URLs that should not be shown	localStorage for about:newtab
URLs with specific positions	localStorage for about:newtab

Communication with Places

Direction	Message	Data	Notes
In:	100 most-visited sites	List of URLs and titles

Communication with Thumbnail Service

Direction	Message	Data	Notes
Out:	URL of the page to get a thumbnail for	string
In:	Path to the thumbnail for a given URL	string/nsIFile

Thumbnail Service

The thumbnail service captures thumbnails of web pages while the user navigates through the web. The currently displayed web content is captured and written to disk as a PNG file.

Stored Data:

What	Where
Thumbnails as raw PNG files	$PROFILE/thumbnails/ directory

Communication with about:newtab

Direction	Message	Data	Notes
In:	URL of the page to get a thumbnail for	string
Out:	Path to the thumbnail for a given URL	string/nsIFile

User Data Risk Minimization

There is a patch for NOT caching data from SSL-enabled pages. This takes care of most of the problem with this feature.

See (for privacy concerns and ideas): bug 754608

Alignment with Privacy Operating Principles

In this section, the privacy champion will identify how the feature lines up with Mozilla's privacy operating principles.

See Also: Privacy/Roadmap_2011#Operating_Principles:

Principle: Transparency / No Surprises

A user may be surprised to see the thumbnails the first few times, but will get quite used to this feature.

Recommendations: It does not seem like there is a facility for disabling this completely (A quick look in about:config turns up no toggle pref)

Principle: Real Choice

Recommendations: see above^^

Principle: Sensible Defaults

The way things are done now is sensible, once the SSL / sensitive pages issue is resolved.

Recommendations:

Principle: Limited Data

The data being collected is limited.

Recommendations: Question: Are a url's thumbnails always over-written so there is not a 'history' of thumbnails in the cache?

Follow-up Tasks and tracking

What	Who	Bug	Details
[NEW] Initial Overview Discussion	?		Meeting time TBD