[HTTPS-Everywhere] URLs in .xsession-errors

[Seth David Schoen]

Walt Sullivan sent a note to this list asking about URLs ending
up in the .xsession-errors file on Linux.  That's an interesting
problem.

I think a tentative answer would be that, at least in the beta
version, we want a lot of debugging information to be conveniently
available so we can help fix bugs quickly.  Some of that debugging
information might be privacy-sensitive and it might make sense to
reduce the amount of debugging information emitted in the final
released version of the program.

One workaround is to start Firefox from a command line in a
terminal instead of via a desktop launcher icon.

$ firefox &

In that case, the HTTPS Everywhere errors, like other Firefox
errors, are output into the terminal rather than saved into
.xession-errors.  (If you don't want to see them at all, you
can close the terminal after starting Firefox.)  If you're
using GNOME, you could also make a "Custom Launcher" of type
"Application in Terminal" that runs Firefox.

I think Firefox has other local-history leaks (not our fault)
that somebody should look into.

-- 
Seth Schoen
Senior Staff Technologist                         schoen at eff.org
Electronic Frontier Foundation                    https://www.eff.org/
454 Shotwell Street, San Francisco, CA  94110     +1 415 436 9333 x107