Program Management/Projects/SearchHijacking
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Background
Web search is a lucrative business and so the search integration points in Web browsers have become a target for add-ons -- from legitimate, to grayware, to malware. The collection of techniques used to circumvent browser search defaults to funnel search revenues to third parties is referred to as "Search hijacking".
With the increase in search hijacking and it's negative effect on user choice and control, Mozilla is looking into ways to help users defend themselves.
Team
- Support: Cheng Wang
- PM: Sheila Mooney
- Engineering: Gavin Sharp
- QA: Juan Becerra
- Security: Al Billings
- Product: Asa Dotzler
Status/Update
- Strawman for Q1: telemetry probe for scoping the problem, hardening keyword URLs.
- Telemetry probes checked in 2/7.
Telemetry
- Simple check 0/1 if pref has changed.
- Tracking in Telemetry Dashboard.
Hardening keyword URLs
- We are going to prompt everyone we see who has changed keyword.URL to a user-set value.
- The prompt will be a notification bar on search.
- We will extend this to all languages.
Bugs/Tracking
- bug 718088 - offer to re-set keyword.URL if it has a non-default value.
- bug 724145 - telemetry for search hijacking.