[HTTPS-Everywhere] Direction of https-everywhere

[Peter Eckersley]

Hi NoHTTP,

These are great questions.  Currently the hope is that we should eventually
merge any rule that seems to be clearly in the interests of HTTPS
Everywhere users.  Before we can do that, however, we need to implement this
performance enhancement:

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/1656

So that adding rulesets doesn't make HTTPS Everywhere slower.

There's a patch in the torpoject bugtracker from an inimitable character named
"bee" that purports to solve this; Mike and I haven't had time to review that
or implement something different yet.

As your post notes, there are some UI issues that need to be addressed about
how the rulesets are presented.   One thing to do is this:

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/1575

Which would allow the UI to scale to perhaps 100-200 rules.  It would also
allow separate categories for local User Rules, of course.

A good solution to your wishlist item #4 would probably make the UI even more
scalable than that, if the user can use a context menu to quickly see and
enable/disable any rules that might be applicable to recently visited sites.

Your wishlist's #1 and #3 are not really near the top of our todo list yet, so
those would be good targets for patches if you're up to it.  I'm happy to
offer pointers on where to get started in the code.

On Tue, Jul 06, 2010 at 05:44:35PM +0100, No http wrote:
> With regards the UI of https-everywhere, what is the planned
> direction?  As it stands with the current UI the more rules that get
> added the more ungainly it becomes and it's probably not overly
> sustainable in the long run.  When it comes to rules, is the plan to
> add all the rulesets that get sent to the list or just cherry pick
> (and clean up/standardize) the best of them?
> 
> A few things I'd like to see in future versions.
> 
> 1) A way to have https-everywhere re-read the HTTPSEverywhereUserRules
> directory with out restarting Firefox
> 2) Separating the user defined rules from the pre packaged rules in the UI
> 3) A way to define whether user rules take precedence over pre packed
> rules or vice versa (I had created rules AmazonUK when 0.1.2 was
> relaesed, after 0.2.1 shipped with (better) Amazon rules they would
> until I deleted mine took precedence) .
> 4) Quicker access to the UI.  Have access via the tools menu instead
> of having to go into Add-Ons/Preferences.
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-- 
Peter Eckersley                            pde at eff.org
Senior Staff Technologist         Tel  +1 415 436 9333 x131
Electronic Frontier Foundation    Fax  +1 415 436 9993