GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 754273
Change some bad default settings
Last modified: 2015-09-01 14:15:46 UTC
Popups should be blocked by default. No clue why they're not. Ads should be blocked by default. We want to turn on privacy blocking by default, and adblocking is a precondition for this. Besides, most users will appreciate it, and it's been years since I've heard of the adblock blocking too much. The do-not-track header should be sent by default. Otherwise, setting the header makes it easier to track you (since fewer users will change the setting than leave it unchanged). It's hard to understate how silly this is. ;) I also wonder why WebAudio is disabled by default?
Created attachment 310233 [details] [review] Flip default settings for popups, adblock, and DNT
Review of attachment 310233 [details] [review]: I agree, but there's only a problem with popups. I think we are no longer providing feedback when a popup is blocked and we don't have a way to allow a particular popup when blocked. I think that's the reason why they are enabled by default. There's no perfect popup blocker, and there could be false positives. Also I think our current code doesn't use any heuristics, it just blocks all popups started with JavaScript. We need to rework the popup handling, and add tests. I think Jon started to work on a UI to manage the popups, but it also required some new API in WebKit that we already have now. So, please, push the changes in individual commits (so that we can revert them individually if needed), and don't push the popups one for now.
The following fixes have been pushed: ef4c8fd Enable adblock by default 4ff8705 Enable DNT headers by default
Created attachment 310260 [details] [review] Enable adblock by default It's been a long time since we've seen complaints about non-ads being blocked.
Created attachment 310261 [details] [review] Enable DNT headers by default Argument in favor: The do-not-track header should be sent by default. Otherwise, setting the header makes it easier to track you (since fewer users will change the setting than leave it unchanged). It's hard to understate how silly this is. ;)