Support/Goals/Search Hijacking
Motivation:
One of the top issues on SUMO is Firefox users who are "hijacked" by malware, bad extensions or other third parties so that their searches no longer go where they expect.
Plan:
The plan is going to be to tackle this from two angles. Right now, we know that a number of "hijacking" is simply changing keyword.URL. Thus, mitigating the keyword.URL issue can proceed. Second, we'd like to see how other forms of hijacking take place and do more research as we expect a simple fix not to last very long.
Keyword.URL fixing:
- Jan 12: First round discussion, come up with proposals. [done]
- Week of Jan 22th: Meet with UX [done], get buy in and design work if needed
- Week of Jan 30: Solidify plan, design, get buy in from any other teams (product, privacy, kev.) [almost done, missing legal]
- Rest of Feb: Coding and QA (mainly Gavin) [ongoing]
- Goal is to have the code in nightly for Firefox 13 (means code must be in Nightly by March 13). Back up is to have it in Firefox 14.
Further investigation work:
We're shelving this plan and going with a simpler one: We have probes in place to see the effectiveness of the keyword.URL fix and will work from there.
- Week of Jan 30: Discuss metrics we want to measure and how to measure them (telemetry)
- Week of Feb 6: Work with privacy to make sure we do this correctly, work with metrics to make sure they can take this kind of data.
- Feb/Mar: code probes (stretch goal: have them in for Fx13, more likely Fx14).
Based on what the probes tell us, we should pursue more long term fixes for hijacking problems including ideas like binding keyword.URL to the search box and bypassing any DNS redirects.
