Advancing Anonymity
This document is a high-level vision for enhancing anonymity on the web, especially supporting the efforts of the Tor project. Not everyone wants to be completely anonymous, but we should help those who want control their anonymity online.
Related:
Vision
Ultimately, it's really hard to be anonymous online right now. On top of that, it's really hard for projects to harness Firefox as a platform that can be extended into an anonymity-instilling tool. We want it to be easy for users to be as anonymous as possible in Firefox, and it should be easy for Tor developers to make sure Firefox is easy to configure as a platform for anonymous browsing.
There are three desired outcomes that will make Firefox a better home for Tor:
- Improve Private Browsing Mode
- Reduced Fingerprintability (leaky pipes)
- Robust suite of experimental/radical privacy features
- Better API-level switches for add-ons like torbutton to control Firefox's behavior
- Better local security and privacy (non-network anonymity)
Features and bugs
| Priority | Item | Status | ETA | Owner | Outcomes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| P1 | Double-key cookies | stalled | TBD | 1.2 | |
| P1 | Block content-window script from accessing Components.* | 1.2 | |||
| P1 | Make local disk privacy optional in Private Browsing Mode | 2 | |||
| P1 | Limit CSS3 resolution and window.screen info to render window size | 1.1 | |||
| P2 | Double-key Cache, DOM Storage, client certs, http auth | 1.2 | |||
| P2 | Provide mechanisms to clear cert store and STS | 2 & 3 | |||
| P3 | Disable addons that don't observe "private-browsing" event/opt-in | 1.1 & 2 | |||
| P3 | Virtualized/memory-only permissions manager and site-specific options | 2 & 3 | |||
| P3 | Provide about:config pref to limit number of fonts loaded per tab | 1.2 & 2 | |||
| P4 | Expose local font loading control to XPCOM/observers | 1.2 & 2 | |||
| P4 | Opt-in activation for plugins | TBD | 1.2 & 2 |
Roadmap
Links to implementation plan and progress: