originfox

Store the download location and referrer in an extended attribute.

Installation

• Download the host binary from the releases and place it somewhere permanent.
• Run /path/to/downloaded/originfox install-manifest firefox to install the native messaging manifest.
• Install the firefox add-on.

The add-on is still pending review as the time of writing, you can go to about:debugging, click "This Firefox" and use "Load Temporary Add-on" to load addon/manifest.json to install the add-on in the meantime.

Attributes

Originfox will set the following attributes on newly download files:

• user.xdg.origin.url: the source url of the download.
• user.xdg.referrer.url: the url the download was initiated from.

For example, if you browsing https://example.com/images and from there download the image https://example.com/img/example.png. Then user.xdg.origin.url will be set to https://example.com/img/example.png and user.xdg.referrer.url to https://example.com/images.

Privacy concerns

Note that the the information this stores with the files is potentially sensitive information. While sharing the files online will not preserve the extended attributes, users should still be aware of the potential issues with leaking download locations.

Supported platforms

This is currently on tested on Linux, if somebody is interested in using it on another operating system and wants to help test feel free to open an issue.