Add user.xdg.origin.url attribute to downloaded files

[rrika]

It didn't feel right to post "me too" on this ticket https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665531 but it's describing exactly what I want and have been using back when chromium offered it. It's really useful and there is no reason not to offer it as opt-in.

[Jon]

Thanks for submitting an idea to the Mozilla Connect community! Your idea is now open to votes (aka kudos) and comments.

[Anonymous]

With this https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rodc/  you can set all extened attributes you like  (or do other stuff with downloaded files)

[rrika]

I should add that I'm personally more interested in user.xdg.referrer.url than user.xdg.origin.url. For example, so I can return from a downloaded photo to the tweet it was attached to.

[rrika]

So I was digging in the firefox sources today and found that firefox does store the origin url, though not in extended file attributes but within gvfs-metadata. You can do this:

$ gio info --attributes=metadata:: download.png
uri: file:///home/rrika/Downloads/download.png
local path: /home/rrika/Downloads/download.png
unix mount: /dev/sda2 / ext4 rw,relatime
attributes:
metadata::download-uri: https://<url_goes_here> 

Relevant code is in toolkit/components/downloads/DownloadPlatform.cpp.

[luis123456789]

This capability sounds interesting but besides being opt-in, it needs to be more visible and configurable to the end user. "Modern" Firefox unfortunately tends to hide or oversimply configurations that are very relevant for security and privacy, and this would be such a case as it is adding metadata about a file's origin and adding a new datapoint (a distributed one at that) about the user's behaviours such as what sites the user browses and when.

Also another thing to consider, is that if an option is going to be there opt-in, what happens to the metadata once the user later opts-out. Should in this case the Forget menu / Clear Personal Data proceed to delete or blank the xattrs of eg.: those files from Downloads that are still reachable in their save point? My knee jerk reaction would be yes, and we have the precedent that the browser is authorized to write information to user mount points since that's where the files are Save As...'d to begin with.

(btw, the link to rodc doesn't work)