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HorlogeSkynet / thunderbird-user.js

Thunderbird privacy, security and anti-fingerprinting: a comprehensive user.js template for configuration and hardening
https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/issues/646
MIT License
144 stars 7 forks source link

Question: Browser component and cache #14

Closed ghost closed 3 years ago

ghost commented 3 years ago

First of all, thanks for the effort to provide a user.js for Thunderbird.

The objective mentions that the browser components are disabled as much as possible. And while I can understand that a separation from the browser should be achieved here, I wonder what Thunderbird actually uses the browser functions for. Apart from calling the addon management, links are passed directly to the external browser, aren't they?

And the second question: What does Thunderbird use the browser.cache.x settings for? That doesn't pertain to caching or keeping emails ready, does it?

HorlogeSkynet commented 3 years ago

First of all, thanks for the effort to provide a user.js for Thunderbird.

Hey ! Thanks, appreciated 🙇

The objective mentions that the browser components are disabled as much as possible. And while I can understand that a separation from the browser should be achieved here, I wonder what Thunderbird actually uses the browser functions for. Apart from calling the addon management, links are passed directly to the external browser, aren't they?

Indeed, I guess they had not been widely disabled in the past in order to keep the add-ons Web part fully-functional. On the links handling, I fear a regular "YMMV" would be answer here, as it might differ across operating systems and/or due to system settings. Also, but I'm not an expert about Mozilla's code bases, browser.* settings might affect more things than you and I may expect (everything is about "Web" now...).

And the second question: What does Thunderbird use the browser.cache.x settings for? That doesn't pertain to caching or keeping emails ready, does it?

I do not know the specifics about this, but I think they only concern regular Web-browsing when performed within a Web tab. Unlike Arkenfox (where it might be a good idea to leave it enabled), I've decided to explicitly keep this "feature" (more of a "behavior" actually) disabled. About your question, I haven't experienced any email caching issues across my personal setups, so I guess they are completely unrelated (but I haven't managed to find a "global" preference for this kind of caching).

Bye 👋

HorlogeSkynet commented 3 years ago

Closing here, feel free to experiment and propose some changes to the template if you think/work out we are currently too "permissive" for emailing-only usages. 👋

HorlogeSkynet commented 2 years ago

FYI, while investigating #26, we noticed that "browser" cache feature is actually being used to download email attachments in RAM (when they are not available in account folder, on disk).