Why is the screenshot tool disabled in Abrowser?

Ignacio Agulló responded to this post via email, which unfortunately seems to have created a [separate forum topic][1]. I will respond to them here, in hopes that further discussion will occur in a single place.

> It is weird for Libre Software to enable this behaviour by default.
> My guess is that that default setting is inherited from Firefox.

I highly doubt this is the case, given that Firefox [promotes this feature on their website][2]. Digging further into the settings.js, I found that it was [disabled by Ruben Rodriguez in 2017][3].

Firefox [mentions data collection][4] on their page, so perhaps this was why it was removed? I can only speculate. I'm not sure if Ruben has the capacity to read all new posts in the forums, but I hope someone knowledgeable on the historical development of Trisquel can shed some light on this eventually.

> I don't really know the reason for this kind of restraint [...]. I can only guess. The legal concerns of taking screenshots could be:
>
> * Care for Privacy. When you access social networks with private content, you get access to photos that are not intended for public redistribution.
> * Care for Copyright. Media corporations have been for decades turning our electronic devices into media kiosks able to reproduce content but unable to keep a copy of it - streaming replaced video downloading, and surely they would be glad to prevent photo downloading too. If you access Instagram with Abrowser, you'll find that saving images is disabled.
>
> My bet is on the second one. [...]

I don't find either of these arguments compelling. Although I agree that corporations would like to prevent us from doing anything other than consuming media, they have not come as far as achieving a blanket block of screenshots. Desktop operating systems, especially Trisquel, are not locked down like mobile operating systems are. Blocking screenshots in Abrowser does nothing to prevent content sharing; the user can just take a screenshot using the OS!

A side note: Instagram tries to prevent saving image in all browsers, not just Abrowser/Firefox. They do this by placing an empty HTML element in front of the image, so that when you right click on where the image is the browser thinks you're clicking on an element that isn't an image. This is easily circumvented by inspecting the page source to see the code for the image element.

> I don't know it either, but I am familiar with this kind of restraint. The same happens with Privacy Browser for Android.

My only experience with something similar was in Firefox for Android. In private browsing tabs (and *only* those) screenshots were disabled. I assume the rationale was to avoid accidentally leaking what you were doing in private browsing, say if someone grabs your phone and takes a screenshot. Or if you simply take a screenshot and forget to delete it afterwards. Photo library syncing would also mean that these screenshots could leak to third parties even if your device isn't directly compromised.

But I don't think this rationale is why it's disabled in Trisquel, because Trisquel isn't billed as a privacy OS and Abrowser is its default browser (opposed to privacy-focused browsers such as Tor).

[1]: https://trisquel.info/en/forum/re-why-screenshot-tool-disabled-abrowser
[2]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/take-screenshots-firefox
[3]: https://gitlab.trisquel.org/trisquel/package-helpers/-/commit/f759433dfc90187a9a295ae574415e49a0b1c116
[4]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/take-screenshots-firefox#w_what-data-does-firefox-screenshots-collect