Outgoing Rules should also offer Quick Settings for common scenarios

[c-s-n]

What would you like to add or change?:

The "Outgoing Rules" section both under "Global Settings" and "App Specific Settings" should get a "Quick Settings" dropdown. Similar to the "Incoming Rules" section (where this already exists). This dropdown should offer predefined rules for common scenarios, like:

• Allowing network scopes: "Allow all to Internet", "Allow all to LAN", "Allow all Device-Local".
• Allowing common protocols: "Allow HTTP/s", etc.
• Blocking everything else

Screenshot of existing dropdown:

Why do you and others need this?:

With a "Default Network Action" of "Prompt", there are a lot of notifications about Apps' outgoing connections. For most Apps I just want to allow access to certain network scopes, and not control fine-grained IP or domain access. This is not only very tedious to accomplish, but also non-intuitive, because the Rule input field allows to enter anything from IPs, domains and scopes and doesn't have any auto-completion or hint (actually, without the "Quick Settings" on "Incoming Rules" I would not even have known you could enter scopes there).

[Raphty]

cool idea, just some further context, in the setup you have been showed that there is an i next to almost every setting, in there this behavior and more is explained, pleas give it a read.

in regards to prompting this is a use case we have built in, but it is not how the team uses Portmaster, so it is a perspective we are usually not looking at. Feedback is always welcome and at the moment the best way to improve how the prompting works :D

@dhaavi I think this is a super idea, and makes the settings more intuitive! can we fit this in in an upcoming release?

[c-s-n]

Thank you @Raphty for your response.

A bit off-topic: I already assumed that you originally focused on a different usage scenario, but therefore I even more appreciate that you are open to such suggestions. After all, Portmaster seems to be the most promising "software firewall" candidate, now that other vendors shifted more towards obscure and bloated "internet security suites" or stopped maintaining their once-awesome products (e.g. Comodo Firewall, where I'm coming from). For gaining a larger user base, it might be worthwhile looking at their use cases - given this doesn't conflict with your original design goal. For example is the SPN feature nothing I currently consider using. Therefore your communicated direction with Portmaster Plus imho seems a good way to go.

Back to topic: I also noticed the (i) to the different settings, and your documentation is indeed valuable, yet (let's be honest 😄) it's usually not the first thing you look at, thus the setting should be as intuitive as possible.

[Raphty]

thank you for the kind words!

We get the feedback that the PM learning curve is too steep quite often, so the ideas to improve the intuitiveness is super welcome.

I did like some of the guides other have made who explicitly called out the things a new user should not pay attention to. and I guess we can start communicating that better as well. I hope that with PM1.4 (dashboard) we go a step closer to not overwhelming new users 😄

[c-s-n]

In https://github.com/safing/portmaster/issues/1282#issuecomment-1684424531 I presented a mockup that also covers this "Quick Settings" topic. Please note how I moved the button into the "+ Add Rule" one, because this is after all what it does. Since my focus in that mockup was a different one, I didn't optimize it that much, but you get the idea. A proper wording imho could be "+ Add Manual Rule" for the existing button and "+ Quick Add Rule" for the new/moved one.