I2P
The Onion Browser has made strides at improving users anonymity when browsing the anonymous web inside of Onion. However, it has in many ways simply re-hashed the existing work of Tor on the Tor Browser. This is mostly a good thing, but it is unfortunate because in a sense we have failed to add Onion specific features that could improve the user experience and set us apart from the Tor Browser.
I think that moving forward, we should try to extend the functionality of Onion Browser into more Onion-specific realms and make an effort to make those things more accessible and highlight that they are in use. I don’t really know how to explain what I mean without describing what I want to do, so
onionbutton contains alot of code from Tor which even they don’t really want to maintain. It’s dying the same long, slow death it’s always been dying, since back before there was a Tor Browser and torbutton was just an easy way to configure Tor in your Firefox browser. I don’t relish the thought of being one the last two groups on the planet maintaining an XUL extension, so I think that we should always be trying to do less with onionbutton and more with a modern extension. Other advantages of modern extensions are better debugging tools and easier-to-use, more understandable API’s for doing the following other things.
It is possible, however unlikely, for an attack on a local service or a router plugin to leak information about what’s going on on the router console because they will share the same origin. We can resolve this issue, though, by placing applications each into their own origin under a so-called “Container Tab,” completely separating eepWeb traffic and Router Console administration. The origin of the application will be the same as the part of the application URL after localhost:7657, so for instance “ http://localhost:7657/torrents” would become just “torrents” in the URL bar and have that origin.
Since Onion Browsing and Router Console Administration are going to be separated to their own contextual identities, we can manipulate the appearance of the Firefox browser to accomplish 2 things: We can indicate which context we are in both by manipulating the UI text and color, and manipulate UI elements based on what context we’re in or even what URL(In the router console) we’re on. We can use this to make router console applications appear more tightly integrated with the functionality of the browser. It’s kind of obliquely like how many applications are written with user-interfaces that are actually just browsers(Including Mattermost), but with us using the whole browser, acknowledging it’s presence and utility but quite literally highlighting(in color) our unique features. So for instance, when the user is using snark it could change color to match snark and change text to say “Torrent Client.”
Onion’s strengths are in it’s applications, but many users never even make it to the applications, and even if they do, the Onion applications often lack the familiar workflows that people are used to. For instance, when one downloads a torrent on the non-anonymous internet, you simply click a link and the browser “Handles” the link, automatically launching the torrent client, adding the torrent, and sometimes prompting the user for more actions. This isn’t possible yet with onionsnark and an external browser, but in Onion browser we can write a “Protocol Handler” which talks to snark-rpc, replicating the ease of just clicking a torrent link to automatically add it to a torrent client. Of course that does require us to bundle the snark-rpc plugin. Besides that, once we’ve added the torrent, we can keep talking to snark-rpc to keep track of the download progress and display information about that in the already-available Firefox downloads menu that users are already familiar with, so that they can keep track of the files they are downloading after navigating away from the snark interface, or perhaps even without needing to interact with snark at all.
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