📣 Help shape Firefox by joining our Test Days event on July 21–27 to test the Firefox Semantic History Search in Firefox Beta 142

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Service worker permissions

  • 3 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 375 views
  • Last reply by inetknght

I found the page "about:debugging#workers"

Inside, I found that there were many sites which had installed "service workers". Many of the sites which had them installed were sites which I do not recall visiting and/or do not wish to permit to keep or store anything on my machine.

I removed most of them. Several of the ones which remained weren't running despite me currently using the site associated with them.

More to the point: how do I have Firefox ask for permission for a site to install a service worker? I poked around "about:config" and noticed that there's overall settings to enable/disable service workers but I don't see anything about per-site configuration. This seems like a significantly overlooked privacy issue.

I found the page "about:debugging#workers" Inside, I found that there were many sites which had installed "service workers". Many of the sites which had them installed were sites which I do not recall visiting and/or do not wish to permit to keep or store anything on my machine. I removed most of them. Several of the ones which remained weren't running despite me currently using the site associated with them. More to the point: how do I have Firefox ask for permission for a site to install a service worker? I poked around "about:config" and noticed that there's overall settings to enable/disable service workers but I don't see anything about per-site configuration. This seems like a significantly overlooked privacy issue.

Chosen solution

There is also the about:serviceworkers page that shows more detail. I'm not aware to always show a confirmation when a website want to register a worker. In most cases a worker is only active when you have a page open. For a push notification you need to grant permission.

Read this answer in context 👍 0

All Replies (3)

I found this; https://www.ghacks.net/2016/03/02/manage-service-workers-in-firefox-and-chrome/ Manage Service Workers in Firefox and Chrome - gHacks Tech News

Chosen Solution

There is also the about:serviceworkers page that shows more detail. I'm not aware to always show a confirmation when a website want to register a worker. In most cases a worker is only active when you have a page open. For a push notification you need to grant permission.

The about:serviceworkers page is different indeed. It does not appear to tell me whether or not a service worker is running, while about:debugging#workers does.

The https://www.ghacks.net/2016/03/02/manage-service-workers-in-firefox-and-chrome/ page appears to be from 2016. Are you trying to tell me that service workers have been around for years and we still do not have privacy controls around them? I thought Firefox wanted to adopt privacy best practices?!