Data Manager: Better View, More Control

One thing that has been bothering me for some time is that while SeaMonkey is a professional, integrated suite, the experience of managing your private data leaves quite a lot room for improvement.

I like pointing people to how easy it is to find the list of Cookies in SeaMonkey (it's right there in the Tools menu), but what people usually get when actually looking at this window is more than just suboptimal: A long list of items. The only thing that's helpful is the fact that there's a search filter.

Also, getting a hold of what a site has stored is way more difficult than it should be, making one go across multiple manager windows. If you are crazy enough to turn on the dialog to ask you every time a site wants to set a cookie and save the "Allow"/"Deny" settings permanently, the list of those grows fairly large as well. And then, there's image and popup blocking, geolocation settings, passwords and whatnot. Oh, and we also don't have a way of finding or managing form data entries (OK, they're not per site, but still data we store).

Last week, after some discussions that mentioned how conservative and backwards we are, I decided I need to march forward with generic innovation in SeaMonkey and do something about that data thing - in the end, more control over your data is fully in line with where Mozilla wants to go and needs to go in my opinion.

So, today, I started to develop an add-on for this, targeted for inclusion in hopefully already SeaMonkey 2.1 - but we'll see. Here's a first teaser screen shot of my work in progress:



The list at the right gives you an overview of all "effective top-level domains" for which you have saved any cookies, permissions, content preferences, or passwords - and a magic "*" one for global things like form data. If you click on any of those, on the right hand side all tabs are enabled that we have info for (cookies and passwords in my example). The tabs list only that data for that domain space (everything below google.com in my example), so it's much easier to find what you want there - and what else the site has stored, through the tabs.

Oh, and it's all in a tab by itself, just like the new Add-ons Manager, and fully in line with the long-term "everything is a tab" strategy of SeaMonkey!

The source is heavily trimmed to only work in current trunk but it's available in my "dataman" repository and best used by cloning or symlinking it into mozilla/extensions and using the build option "--enable-extensions=default,datamon". In theory, it should work in Firefox, though I haven't tested and not made an overlay for a menu entry yet (about:data in the location bar should just work, though).

Note that this is all just one day's work so far, so not too much is working yet - we list domains for all the data, activate the correct tabs, but only the cookie tab has any content, and that is just a bare list. It's a start, though.

I hope this will make a good addition to at least SeaMonkey to enable better management of data for our users!