Additional browser support in RequestPolicy
I’ve spent the last few days adding support for more browsers to RequestPolicy. As of RequestPolicy 0.4.3, the following are now supported:
- Firefox 3+
- SeaMonkey 2.0 (tested on 2.0a2)
- Flock 2.0
- Fennec 1.0 (tested on 1.0a2)
- Songbird 1.0
Fennec took a bit of fiddling because it’s not well documented yet. However, the code is available and that helped. Here are some screenshots of the fruits of my Fennec labor. A quick look shows that RequestPolicy is the 12th extension to add support for Fennec (RequestPolicy is the most popular experimental one).
I had never actually gotten around to trying Flock before, and that was interesting. I definitely see its value to a large number of social network-using and mucho media-viewing users.
Hi Justin,
I’m very interested about your RequestPolicy firefox extension, but being quite new to that, was wondering how to “activate” the logs, or if they were already activated, where to read their content…
Thx!
sam.
@Sam – There are two different logs you may be referring to. The one that is referred to as the “Request Log” in the menu is fairly simple, it only starts logging when made visible and it clears the log data as soon as the Request Log is closed. Note that if you have more than one window open, any single window’s Request Log will show requests for all windows. The Request Log doesn’t write any of this info to disk.
The other type of logging you can turn on gives you more detailed info but is hidden away because most people don’t want to use it. It’s mostly there for my development purposes, but people who are curious or are tracking down suspected bugs may find it useful. To turn on this logging, first start Firefox from the command line and then go to about:config in your address bar. In the filter field of about:config, enter “requestpolicy” and you’ll see the following among the filtered settings:
extensions.requestpolicy.log
extensions.requestpolicy.log.level
extensions.requestpolicy.log.types
Double-click on extensions.requestpolicy.log to change it to “true”. At this point you should now get lots of output to the terminal where you started Firefox from when you browser or use the menu. To cut down the amount of logged info to things you’re probably more interested in, set extensions.requestpolicy.log.level to 800 and extensions.requestpolicy.log.types to 23. Here’s more details on the levels and types (the type value you set in about:config is the sum of the types you’re interested in):
TYPE_CONTENT = 1;TYPE_META_REFRESH = 2;
TYPE_HEADER_REDIRECT = 4;
TYPE_INTERNAL = 8; // internal happenings of the extension
TYPE_ERROR = 16;
LEVEL_OFF = Number.MAX_VALUE; // no loggingLEVEL_SEVERE = 1000;
LEVEL_WARNING = 900;
LEVEL_INFO = 800;
LEVEL_DEBUG = 700;
LEVEL_ALL = Number.MIN_VALUE; // log everything
Is Firefox 2 going to be added onto the list? I’m surprised it’s not already on there.
(and before you say it, NO I will not upgrade to Firefox 3. I do not like the new “features” of Firefox 3.)
Hi Maverynthia,
If RequestPolicy was feature-complete, I’d definitely work on supporting Firefox 2. However, it’s going to be a year or two before it’s there. That’s too far off for me to make any guesses about adding support for Firefox 2.
I think the best bet is for somebody who uses Fx 2 to fork RequestPolicy and then hit me up with questions as they go. I’ll happily support people working on that.
(The complete source code is available in the extension’s xpi and within a month or so I’ll probably have the repository public, Trac setup, and all that goodness.)