RequestPolicy/tractest — Issue #112: Selective reload on policy change
Author: jsamuel
Created: 2011-12-22 02:40:11+00:00
State: open
Labels: extension

Often cross-site requests are either limited to elements on the page itself (eg an img) or are generated by such an element (eg flash).

It would be useful to conserve a little time (and bandwidth) to reload solely those elements that would have no adverse affects from a random reload, such as img and embeded objects?

Granted, randomly reloading other elements, eg scripts, may leave the page in an unknown and potentially undesired state, it seems possible to reload "safe" elements exclusive of the page itself.

The question then becomes:

1. How to conclusively identify whether any "unsafe" elements are affected.
2. Whether policy changes are frequent enough to warrant this.

At least for my use case (continual policy changes due to new round-robin subdomains), this could be addressed through resolution of other existing bugs:

#8 -- Support Wildcards, Regex, CDIR
#63 -- Support Wildcards
#91 -- Rules only honored if specificity matching current strictness
#103 -- Rules only honored if specificity matching current strictness

It should also be noted that #6 (blacklist support) would help to some extent; however, some sites do not use a consistent combination of cross site requests...

For the time being, I guess I could disable auto-reload and trigger manual reload of specific desired elements through javascript; however, this would seem to defeat the purpose of trying to save a little time/bandwidth.

A different use case could be users with non-unlimited bandwidth plans, eg firefox on mobile (speculative).