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How can I stop firefox from connecting to google at startup. (lemmy.today)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/firefox@lemmy.ml
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My home page is blank. My search engine is duckduck go.

I only have adblock and noscript.

I want firefox to not access google - ever. Right now it shows that it connects and maintains a connection permanently.

I find it infuritating actually.

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[–] 27 points 8 months ago (1 child)

How did you figure out you are establishing a connection to google? Wireshark or similar?

Does it happen specifically as you open Firefox, or what do you mean with keeping ‘a connection permanently’? Which endpoint is it trying to reach?

I feel these are important details before people can help you out.

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  • [–] [S] 6 points 8 months ago

    Firefox is trying to connect to 34.160.144.191 at startup. It continues the connection, perhaps to reuse it, or whatever.

    Firefox should never talk to google. And if there is some database that google has that firefox needs, Firefox should duplicate that DB. The fact that I have this thing talking to google anytime I do anything is gross. Anyhow. Blah blah blah. I'm annoying! ;-)

    I have a feeling it's the safebrowsing. Will find out later. And then will disable.

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    • [–] 22 points 8 months ago (19 children)

    At your own risk, disable Safe Browsing. And add all Google domains to the blacklist of uBlock Origin. Or you can simply switch to LibreWolf and go on with your life.

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  • [–] 17 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Yes, Google Safe Browsing is probably the cause. Anyone curious can read more about it here, but that traffic at browser startup is probably going to Google's Safe Browsing API servers.

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    f course not; it’s the distro that makes the call. But I want the Librewolf folks to make the effort to get accepted by the distro.

    Hmm, I will try the LibreWolf - will also try disabling safe browsing.

    Thanks for the info!

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 8 months ago

    Btw, disabling Safe Browsing didn't do the trick.

    I did download LibreWolf. I have bad news - it does exactly the same thing.

    Sigh. Maybe if you are using it you should profile it on osx or windows - or ntop linux I think will do it.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    LibreWolf can't be a convenient daily driver. Need tweaks and tweaking default settings may reduce privacy and security slightly.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Yes, I've tried it multiple times, but, apart of the so-called "privacy features", I can't find a single reason to use it instead of regular Firefox. Well, I suppose that if you're really paranoid, or hate every single decision Mozilla makes with the force of a thousand suns, then it can be appealing.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (11 children) 
    $ sudo apt install librewolf
[sudo: authenticate] Password: 
Error: Unable to locate package librewolf
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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (10 children)

    (https://librewolf.net/installation/debian/)

    We have a repository for Debian-based distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, etc.), with which you can easily install and update LibreWolf. To add it to your system and install LibreWolf, run the following commands one by one:

    sudo apt update && sudo apt install extrepo -y

    sudo extrepo enable librewolf && sudo extrepo update librewolf

    sudo apt update && sudo apt install librewolf -y

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  • [+] -10 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (9 children)

    I don't want to have to "taint" my distro install by adding a repo. I want it to be available from my distro's official repo.

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  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Adding a repo is not "tainting" an install. Adding a package to the official repo is not the responsibility of the devs but of Debian's package maintainers.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago* (2 children)

    https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian

    Anyway, the bottom line is that if LibreWolf folks want more people to use their software, then one of them ought to become a Debian package maintainer for that package.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    The only relevant part in that link is this:

    Some third-party repositories might appear safe to use as they contain only packages that have no equivalent in Debian. However, there are no guarantees that any repository will not add more packages in future, leading to breakage.

    And you should be safe about this.

    As I was saying, the devs are not responsible for including the package to the official repo. You are owed nothing and have plenty of other options to install it.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    As for your bottom line remember the contributors are working on it for free, they are not selling anything. So they are not running after more users. It's good as it is, non technical people can use flatpack or AppImage and technical people can add a repo without issues.

    And someday someone could add it to the official repo, it could be you.

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    • [–] 7 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    DNS over HTTPS could be using the Google DNS services.

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    • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    I'm not sure about in Firefox directly but if you use a local dns or similar you could have Google resolve to nothing

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    • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    For years, just in case I've missed disabling some FF telemetry ... Every night I disable networking. Mornings I start FF up first, and (once my -local- home page is fully loaded) only then do I enable networking.

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    [–] [S] 3 points 8 months ago

    Ok I have some news -

    It's not safebrowsing - or probably not - maybe I just can't turn it off now or something.

    So I

    • "refreshed" firefox to get to original state
    • disabled all of safebrowsing via settings and then via about:config -> "safebr*.enabled"
    • disabled all telemetry that got turned on via refresh
    • turned off fucking AI

    Nothing worked.

    Eventually got logs running with: "export MOZ_LOG=timestamp,rotate:200,nsHttp:5,cache2:5,nsSocketTransport:100,nsHostResolver:100"

    found out mozilla is doing fucking push notifications?? wtf. that resolves to google? turned that off.

    Anyway, it does a bunch of shit. All talking to google in the end.

    I hate Firefox. I'm so over all of this.

    When I start the browser, and it is blank, and I have done nothing, it should do nothing. If it needs some base certificate updates, it should do this once a week. Or never. Let me decide.

    Talking to google, even doing dns lookups every fucking time I open a browser. God. Who are these people. /rant

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    [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    Have you activated push notifications on some Google service?

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    [–] -1 points 8 months ago

    You lost zero info for how you think it’s connecting…?

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