We decided to get rid of the firefox profile, because it was becoming the default profile on a few users' systems, causing severe problems as the user didn't know what a browser profile is let alone how to switch back to the default one.
This meant freenet would typically be browsed by the user in their normal web browser, leaving two problems: 1. The browser history - freesites browsed would end up in their browser history, which could easily be probed by malicious web sites on the Internet. 2. Performance - Freenet requests frequently take a long time, but web browsers allow a very limited number of parallel connections to a single host; it would be much better to have lots of connections in parallel. We had hoped that the first problem could be solved by "history cloaking", i.e. adding a ?secureid= parameter to each URL. This would depend on the URL being accessed, and on a node-specific random string. The browse scripts have been updated to open the correct initial URL, links in freesites and in fproxy have been fixed. Unfortunately, there is a serious problem with this ... If a user inserts a file, then copies the URL to announce it, and forgets to convert the URL into a key by stripping off the ?secureid= at the end and the http://127.0.0.1:<port>/ at the beginning, it will still be usable; the receiving user may need to strip the key, but the beginning bit is already stripped by fproxy. But a malicious attacker can then probe for this URL (using standard history stealing), assuming they can get the user to visit a website they control. Just because the user has visited the site with the original secureid doesn't mean they inserted it, but if a user other than the original inserter visits it, they will get a warning page asking them to clear their browser history ... clearly it is an unacceptable risk. For now, I will add an extra stage to the first-time wizard, asking whether the user wants history cloaking and explaining the caveats either way. But really the solution is a proper Freenet UI where we have a Key bar rather than a Location bar. This can be implemented in a regular browser with javascript, or it can be implemented (more cleanly and safely, and solving several other problems) by building a dedicated Freenet browser, as saces has started to work on.
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