Tor browser without icons.

Any feedback, suggestion, bug reports, problems....
Post Reply
ssobb
Posts: 3
Joined: Fri Mar 02, 2012 2:27 am

Tor browser without icons.

Post by ssobb » Fri Sep 07, 2018 7:35 pm

Tor 8.0, FlagFox 6.1.5

Image

Image

In the "normal" Firefox icons are all displayed.

p.s. You can add a complete list of actions available for easy copying and pasting? For example, I need {baseDomainName}
Image

User avatar
DaveG
Flagfox Developer
Posts: 723
Joined: Wed Oct 03, 2007 9:06 pm
Location: Philadelphia, USA

Re: Tor browser without icons.

Post by DaveG » Sun Sep 09, 2018 7:07 am

Not the question above, but just to answer the similar, frequently asked one: The Tor Browser won't be able to have the flags, as Tor and other proxies hide the locations of things that connect through them, and it goes both ways. (local DNS requests can be used to get around this, but doing so in the background is a privacy/security leak currently not allowed by Flagfox; in the future, encrypted DNS might allow this to be viable, somehow)

As to the favicons: that's weird, and should work. I just downloaded the latest version of the Tor Browser Bundle and gave it a test and got the same result. I'll look into it. Thank you very much for reporting this.

About action parameters, there's a sticky in the Custom Actions subforum: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=191

It looks like I haven't updated that sticky in 7 years, but it has what you need. For example, "{baseDomainName}" is exactly what you think it is. (e.g. for "www.example.com" -> "example.com") These placeholders are not case-sensitive.

I used to have a full help page, complete with copy/paste buttons, built into Flagfox 5.x, but it got dropped in the transition to Firefox 57+ and Mozilla's new mandatory WebExtension API. The previous markup language all the GUI was written in, XUL, was fully banned, and everything needed porting to HTML (with lots of hacks to make it even possible). Re-implementing that help page is still on my todo list, and I've been trying to make time to put work into doing that lately.

User avatar
DaveG
Flagfox Developer
Posts: 723
Joined: Wed Oct 03, 2007 9:06 pm
Location: Philadelphia, USA

Re: Tor browser without icons.

Post by DaveG » Sun Sep 09, 2018 7:12 am

One minor follow up thing: I did just test this, so I do know it doesn't properly load the icons, however your screenshots are specifically with the icons disabled via the checkbox at the top of the Flagfox options page. I assume you tried clicking it to troubleshoot. With them disabled, there's no icons in the menu at all; with them enabled and broken in Tor, they're all default icons in the menu. The options page always has some icons, potentially all defaults. The main reason I noticed this nuance is because Geotool has no icon in your second screenshot, but it does by default (with icons enabled), because the icon ships inside the Flagfox installer, itself, unlike everything else. TL;DR: You do have icons disabled, currently, but that's not what's causing any issues.

User avatar
DaveG
Flagfox Developer
Posts: 723
Joined: Wed Oct 03, 2007 9:06 pm
Location: Philadelphia, USA

Re: Tor browser without icons.

Post by DaveG » Sun Sep 09, 2018 7:50 am

And here I am, using a forum like a bug tracker, again. In any case, I installed Flagfox into Tor in debug mode and error messages tell the story, e.g.:
[CACHE] fetched & cached favicon: "https://www.virustotal.com/favicon.ico" util.js:47:47
Blocked moz-extension://596cfc7a-0384-4468-9cb0-122d535367b8/_generated_background_page.html in page moz-extension://596cfc7a-0384-4468-9cb0-122d535367b8/_generated_background_page.html from extracting canvas data because no user input was detected. moz-extension://596cfc7a-0384-4468-9cb0-122d535367b8/cache.js:325.
So, it looks like Tor has decided to put some extra unknown security requirements in place that break everything here. I tested both with the initial prefetch and after clearing the cache and thus making the menu load do it over. Neither works, which also means that the user input detection it seems to want doesn't detect the menu API properly, somehow.

Digging deeper, it looks like this is controlled by the "privacy.resistFingerprinting" pref in "about:config". There is another pref in there explicitly for canvases, which is what it's complaining about, but toggling that does nothing helpful here, unfortunately. If you chose to disable this feature, you'll need to follow up by clearing the cached "favicons" it got from those errors, as it's returning placeholder transparent icons instead of breaking completely, it seems. You can do this via the browser preferences (either from menu, or "about:preferences"), under the Privacy & Security tab, in the second section, on the right side, is a Clear History button. You'll want to clear cookies OR offline website data to make things take effect (strangely, either works here, because localStorage is considered sorta both). You'll probably want to have only one of those checked and the timeframe set to everything. Do that, with this Tor feature disabled, and the icons can show in the Flagfox options page with a refresh. The menu will only update if it's the first time this session or you change it, which you can do by just toggling any action on/off with its checkbox, to force menu regen on next open. After this, so long as the option is off, it should work the same as it does in normal Firefox. All that said, I'm not sure I'd recommend you do this unless you understand what you're disabling. Without getting into too much detail, they've come up with a system to protect users from a way of tracking people by abusing a certain feature in a weird way, and this is collateral damage. Everything else should work without the icons, so you can just turn them off and live in a more grey world, but it will all work.

I don't know if there's any simple way to work around this Tor limitation, but I'll look into it at some point. I do not suspect it'd be easy, however. No promises there, but at least we know what's going on now. In the pantheon of my never-ending Flagfox todo list, reintroducing an in-addon help page is much higher on that list than getting favicons to work in a secondary supported web browser.

User avatar
DaveG
Flagfox Developer
Posts: 723
Joined: Wed Oct 03, 2007 9:06 pm
Location: Philadelphia, USA

Re: Tor browser without icons.

Post by DaveG » Tue Sep 11, 2018 9:00 pm

Ok, did some more investigation here. It seems the browser setting in question here is actually in Firefox, but only enabled in the Tor Browser, at the moment. It's normally supposed to come with a prompt, which fails to show here, and they actually didn't seem to intend for this to affect extensions, so in Firefox 61 they've disabled it for within them. However, we've now hit our standard "Extended Support Release" doesn't really mean what you think it means, problem: Tor is using the ESR as their base, and thus doesn't and won't have their fix. They basically need to backport that patch, which they might do because it does affect stuff like the PDF viewer. Bottom line: it's basically something the Tor Browser Bundle needs to fix on their end.

I looked into doing what's needed here via a different method, and whilst possible, it's quite inefficient and I don't want a Tor-only hack here, especially given the fact that Flagfox can never work fully under Tor to begin with. Favicons just aren't going to work in Flagfox 6.1.x in the Tor Browser bundle until they fix this.

Post Reply