10 ms·

What I want from Firefox is a mode, even hidden behind about:config, even by a combination of settings, that results in 0 network traffic upon start and all tra

What I want from Firefox is a mode, even hidden behind about:config, even by a combination of settings, that results in 0 network traffic upon start and all traffic is associated with my UI interactions. Even with telemetry off, all kinds of information about my browsing behavior from the myriad connections it makes upon start and exit can be gleaned. Certificate chain updates, etc can be delayed until a secure connection is requested by me. The amount of unsolicited and virtually uncontrollable network traffic from macOS, Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, etc is bad enough, I expect more from Mozilla that never stops marketing its privacy features. I believe I have the right to control when and for what purpose the computer and software that I own communicates with third parties.

rhizome 5y ago
Is this to say you want zero page-loading of existing tabs on startup (if in fact you save your tabs across restarts)?
- offmycloud 5y ago
  Actaully, yes. They could replace the content of the page with a message box containing the page's title and URL, and a "click to reload" button.
  - kroltan 5y ago
    It seems this could be accomplished by extensions - at the very least for tab-related requests, as far as I know - since uBlock Origin has a setting that holds every request until it can update the filter lists.
- marssaxman 5y ago
  I do not save tabs and I do not want anything to load at startup: just one window with one completely blank tab, please!
  - Minor49er 5y ago
    Similarly, I have developed a habit of opening a new tab that loads about:home before I exit. That way, the other tabs act as active bookmarks. I'm not immediately faced with any given one of them when I start a new session. I don't know if anyone else does this, but it also saves me from loading any pages unless I really want to see what it is.
    - quesera 5y ago
      I actually keep a pinned tab at the default page about:home for this purpose, and select it before closing the browser. In combination with tabs defaulting to unloaded in a new instance of the browser, this adds some control over memory consumption and network activity.
  - rhizome 5y ago
    As a many-tabs saver and reloader, chapeau to you. Good luck, I'm pulling for you!
- account42 5y ago
  Actually yes, I'd prefer the browser to restore the page it had already loaded before instead of whatever is served there now.
  - rhizome 5y ago
    I feel you, but the browser-cache train left the station years ago. :/
tannhaeuser 5y ago
I find your demands reasonable, especially the principle where HTTP traffic is initiated if and only if carried out in response to direct user interaction. The thing with right to control, though, is that someone, somehow has to develop a browser and make ends meet.
- endgame 5y ago
  What if - and bear with me here - Mozilla set up a way for us to fund Firefox directly?
  - fredoliveira 5y ago
    Shocking idea in 2022. No, but seriously, Mozilla — I'll pay you real dollars for this.
    - leeoniya 5y ago
      too late for me. they fired a ton of engineering talent working on exciting tech (servo) to chase some bundled vpn rebrand. what a misguided move, like most everything they've done in non-engineering space. sad. before, i would have donated hundreds or more if there was a way to pay directly for firefox and thunderbird. but not anymore. at least the CEO's salary keeps going up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24563698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24563698
      - shubhamkrm 5y ago
        There's a way to directly donate to Thunderbird: https://give.thunderbird.net/en-US/ https://give.thunderbird.net/en-US/ Unfortunately, there's no such option for Firefox.
        endgame 5y ago
        At this point, I'm starting to wonder whether or not Mozilla leadership is controlled opposition.
causality0 5y ago
I agree. It's fucking ridiculous that someone at Mozilla forgetting to renew a cert resulted in the simultaneous disabling of every single Firefox extension on earth. I wouldn't be surprised if someone (an activist, a gay person, etc) in an oppressive country died as a result of suddenly losing their VPN/privacy extensions.
- 411111111111111 5y ago
  I sure hope that none of the people that are in danger trust in the obscurity provided by in browser vpns. If they do then it always was just a question of time for them to be found out, as just adding a webrtc session to the website makes their ip transparent again. Same with unique dns queries etc
  - Karunamon 5y ago
    This also happened to Tor Browser, the whole point of which is that you can trust it.
- Borealid 5y ago
  Is there a phrase that describes the process of taking something one thinks is bad - here, Firefox extensions being disabled - and searching for the most egregious possible negative consequence that might have occurred (here, someone being murdered), and then using that as a hypothetical? The goal is obviously to try to increase the emotional weight of the argument against... whatever... but I'm seeing this demilogical construction used more and more in the wild and would like to know its name.
  - mackrevinack 5y ago
    its mainly because saying "someone could have gotten a slap on the wrist because of this mistake" isnt really worth mentioning
  - klysm 5y ago
    Is it not useful to consider the envelop of possibilities from a widespread outage like that?
alberth 5y ago
Devils advocate… How should auto-updater work then?
- duncan-donuts 5y ago
  It shouldn’t?
- nextaccountic 5y ago
  Here it updates when I run pacman -Syu. If I were to use Firefox built-in update, I would want it to show me a popup asking me whether to update
  - batch12 5y ago
    Well a popup asking if it okay to check for updates which would run every x times the browser is launched or on a schedule. The popup should have an option to not ask again for those that get annoyed. Otherwise the browser would need to call home to see if an update is available before asking if you want the new version of course.
- fuzzer37 5y ago
  It shouldn't. Users should be using a package manager to manage software. Windows fucked up users expectations by not including a sane one by default... ever. And no, Windows Store doesn't count.
  - oblio 5y ago
    > Users should Users should and regular people should: * not smoke * not drink * eat healthy food in moderate amounts * ... "Should" almost never works, especially at scale.
  - _vdpp 5y ago
    Package managers are a necessary evil on systems where installing software scatters a bunch of files all over because of a dogmatic adherence to an obsolete FHS. It’s a huge burden on either the distro maintainers or the developers to produce new packages for already-written software, which often results in outdated or broken releases available in the package repos. And now every language ecosystem has one or more package managers for development libs - pip, conda, cargo, npm, opam, dub, etc. - and then optional package managers like choco, homebrew, and probably some others I missed. It’s a huge mess. So instead we throw up our hands and just bundle everything we need in a container and duplicate the _whole distro_ because the “package” ecosystem is such a disaster. The sane way to handle software installs and uninstalls would have been cp/rm.
charcircuit 5y ago
>software that I own You don't own Firefox. You have a license to use it. Background network traffic is not a big deal. Ignoring downloading important updates the bandwidth the requests use is not significant. In such a large and complex piece of software as a web browser I do not understand why traffic should be associated with UI interactions. How is the browser supposed to show a notification when someone tweets? Would you prefer to hit a "Check for Notifications" button or would you prefer to just get a notification. The latter option has a million times better UX.
- user123456780 5y ago
  > Would you prefer to hit a "Check for Notifications" button or would you prefer to just get a notification. The latter option has a million times better UX. I would a love a button for every action. Particularly for things like check for notifications. The current problem is that someone else believes they know what a better UX is, any by better they mean better for the company for whatever reason.
- foresto 5y ago
  GP's needs are not invalid just because they differ from yours.
myfonj 5y ago
I understand your intention is to launch "cold" Firefox instance that does not call home, update the "safe browsing" databases etc, so this will probably not be of any help, but you may try launching it with `--offline` command line argument and uncheck the (alt) "Menu > File > Work Offline" when you are ready to "reveal yourself". For testing it with throwaway profile you can do: firefox --offline --no-remote --profile <path where throwaway profile folder can be created> The `--offline` argument is quite strange for a several reasons: 1. it is quite undocumented, but works from what I've tried. It is not even exposed in `firefox --help | more`. It used to be mentioned at MDN page [1] but that is gone now. 2. From what I've tried now, offline mode lets you browse localhost, what seems super useful but I don't recall it have always been this way. 3. Also browsing properly cached pages seems to work super well; not sure it is due service workers finally caught up and works or proper HTTP headers are used nowadays. Interesting is that even the hard refresh of cached page gives you cached version in offline mode. (Again, I'm not sure it used to be this way in the past. I remember that nearly no webpage worked well in offline mode few years back.) I have not run any network traffic audit so I cannot verify it really does not attempt to reach for something outside localhost. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20210530092017/https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Command_Line_Options http://web.archive.org/web/20210530092017/https://developer.... (I have a super murky memory it might be me who added it there, but today I had to find SU answer mentioning it [2] to even try that) [2] https://superuser.com/questions/1691419/how-to-start-firefox-in-offline-mode-from-a-command-line https://superuser.com/questions/1691419/how-to-start-firefox... (Update) And one more thing: when using Profile Manager there is a nifty "Work offline" checkbox in there. Run firefox --profilemanager There is also checkbox "Use selected profile without asking" that when unchecked presumably adds [General] StartWithLastProfile=0 to the `<appdata>\Mozilla\Firefox\installs.ini`. I've found this handy to do if you occasionally mess with various Fx versions and want to be sure you will not unintentionally load "nightly" profile with "stable" executable.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
"I believe I have the right to control when and for what purpose the computer and software that I own communicates with third parties." Theoretically we already have this control. We can edit the Firefox source to disable the undesired traffic before compiling. In practice it takes me more time and resources to compile Firefox than it does to compile the kernel for the host OS (NetBSD). Most Firefox users probably use binaries and do not compile from source. I would prefer to see a smaller, less featureful additonal version of Firefox that compiles faster and with fewer required resources. For advanced users, this would remove the friction against making source changes and compiling as opposed to using binaries. It would also potentially open up an opportunity for others to create customised versions of Firefox with, e.g., reduced attack surface, less need for "updates" and better suited to avoiding telemetry, and internet advertising-related surveillance. The actual or effective inability to compile from source places more control with Mozilla and less control with the user. Thus we continually find Firefox users on HN pleading with Mozilla to make changes instead of making the changes themselves.

rhizome 5y ago

Is this to say you want zero page-loading of existing tabs on startup (if in fact you save your tabs across restarts)?

offmycloud 5y ago
Actaully, yes. They could replace the content of the page with a message box containing the page's title and URL, and a "click to reload" button.
- kroltan 5y ago
  It seems this could be accomplished by extensions - at the very least for tab-related requests, as far as I know - since uBlock Origin has a setting that holds every request until it can update the filter lists.
marssaxman 5y ago
I do not save tabs and I do not want anything to load at startup: just one window with one completely blank tab, please!
- Minor49er 5y ago
  Similarly, I have developed a habit of opening a new tab that loads about:home before I exit. That way, the other tabs act as active bookmarks. I'm not immediately faced with any given one of them when I start a new session. I don't know if anyone else does this, but it also saves me from loading any pages unless I really want to see what it is.
  - quesera 5y ago
    I actually keep a pinned tab at the default page about:home for this purpose, and select it before closing the browser. In combination with tabs defaulting to unloaded in a new instance of the browser, this adds some control over memory consumption and network activity.
- rhizome 5y ago
  As a many-tabs saver and reloader, chapeau to you. Good luck, I'm pulling for you!
account42 5y ago
Actually yes, I'd prefer the browser to restore the page it had already loaded before instead of whatever is served there now.
- rhizome 5y ago
  I feel you, but the browser-cache train left the station years ago. :/

tannhaeuser 5y ago

I find your demands reasonable, especially the principle where HTTP traffic is initiated if and only if carried out in response to direct user interaction. The thing with right to control, though, is that someone, somehow has to develop a browser and make ends meet.

endgame 5y ago
What if - and bear with me here - Mozilla set up a way for us to fund Firefox directly?
- fredoliveira 5y ago
  Shocking idea in 2022. No, but seriously, Mozilla — I'll pay you real dollars for this.
  - leeoniya 5y ago
    too late for me. they fired a ton of engineering talent working on exciting tech (servo) to chase some bundled vpn rebrand. what a misguided move, like most everything they've done in non-engineering space. sad. before, i would have donated hundreds or more if there was a way to pay directly for firefox and thunderbird. but not anymore. at least the CEO's salary keeps going up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24563698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24563698
    - shubhamkrm 5y ago
      There's a way to directly donate to Thunderbird: https://give.thunderbird.net/en-US/ https://give.thunderbird.net/en-US/ Unfortunately, there's no such option for Firefox.
      - endgame 5y ago
        At this point, I'm starting to wonder whether or not Mozilla leadership is controlled opposition.

causality0 5y ago

I agree. It's fucking ridiculous that someone at Mozilla forgetting to renew a cert resulted in the simultaneous disabling of every single Firefox extension on earth. I wouldn't be surprised if someone (an activist, a gay person, etc) in an oppressive country died as a result of suddenly losing their VPN/privacy extensions.

411111111111111 5y ago
I sure hope that none of the people that are in danger trust in the obscurity provided by in browser vpns. If they do then it always was just a question of time for them to be found out, as just adding a webrtc session to the website makes their ip transparent again. Same with unique dns queries etc
- Karunamon 5y ago
  This also happened to Tor Browser, the whole point of which is that you can trust it.
Borealid 5y ago
Is there a phrase that describes the process of taking something one thinks is bad - here, Firefox extensions being disabled - and searching for the most egregious possible negative consequence that might have occurred (here, someone being murdered), and then using that as a hypothetical? The goal is obviously to try to increase the emotional weight of the argument against... whatever... but I'm seeing this demilogical construction used more and more in the wild and would like to know its name.
- mackrevinack 5y ago
  its mainly because saying "someone could have gotten a slap on the wrist because of this mistake" isnt really worth mentioning
- klysm 5y ago
  Is it not useful to consider the envelop of possibilities from a widespread outage like that?

alberth 5y ago

Devils advocate… How should auto-updater work then?

duncan-donuts 5y ago
It shouldn’t?
nextaccountic 5y ago
Here it updates when I run pacman -Syu. If I were to use Firefox built-in update, I would want it to show me a popup asking me whether to update
- batch12 5y ago
  Well a popup asking if it okay to check for updates which would run every x times the browser is launched or on a schedule. The popup should have an option to not ask again for those that get annoyed. Otherwise the browser would need to call home to see if an update is available before asking if you want the new version of course.
fuzzer37 5y ago
It shouldn't. Users should be using a package manager to manage software. Windows fucked up users expectations by not including a sane one by default... ever. And no, Windows Store doesn't count.
- oblio 5y ago
  > Users should Users should and regular people should: * not smoke * not drink * eat healthy food in moderate amounts * ... "Should" almost never works, especially at scale.
- _vdpp 5y ago
  Package managers are a necessary evil on systems where installing software scatters a bunch of files all over because of a dogmatic adherence to an obsolete FHS. It’s a huge burden on either the distro maintainers or the developers to produce new packages for already-written software, which often results in outdated or broken releases available in the package repos. And now every language ecosystem has one or more package managers for development libs - pip, conda, cargo, npm, opam, dub, etc. - and then optional package managers like choco, homebrew, and probably some others I missed. It’s a huge mess. So instead we throw up our hands and just bundle everything we need in a container and duplicate the _whole distro_ because the “package” ecosystem is such a disaster. The sane way to handle software installs and uninstalls would have been cp/rm.

charcircuit 5y ago

>software that I own You don't own Firefox. You have a license to use it. Background network traffic is not a big deal. Ignoring downloading important updates the bandwidth the requests use is not significant. In such a large and complex piece of software as a web browser I do not understand why traffic should be associated with UI interactions. How is the browser supposed to show a notification when someone tweets? Would you prefer to hit a "Check for Notifications" button or would you prefer to just get a notification. The latter option has a million times better UX.

user123456780 5y ago
> Would you prefer to hit a "Check for Notifications" button or would you prefer to just get a notification. The latter option has a million times better UX. I would a love a button for every action. Particularly for things like check for notifications. The current problem is that someone else believes they know what a better UX is, any by better they mean better for the company for whatever reason.
foresto 5y ago
GP's needs are not invalid just because they differ from yours.

myfonj 5y ago

I understand your intention is to launch "cold" Firefox instance that does not call home, update the "safe browsing" databases etc, so this will probably not be of any help, but you may try launching it with `--offline` command line argument and uncheck the (alt) "Menu > File > Work Offline" when you are ready to "reveal yourself". For testing it with throwaway profile you can do: firefox --offline --no-remote --profile <path where throwaway profile folder can be created> The `--offline` argument is quite strange for a several reasons: 1. it is quite undocumented, but works from what I've tried. It is not even exposed in `firefox --help | more`. It used to be mentioned at MDN page [1] but that is gone now. 2. From what I've tried now, offline mode lets you browse localhost, what seems super useful but I don't recall it have always been this way. 3. Also browsing properly cached pages seems to work super well; not sure it is due service workers finally caught up and works or proper HTTP headers are used nowadays. Interesting is that even the hard refresh of cached page gives you cached version in offline mode. (Again, I'm not sure it used to be this way in the past. I remember that nearly no webpage worked well in offline mode few years back.) I have not run any network traffic audit so I cannot verify it really does not attempt to reach for something outside localhost. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20210530092017/https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Command_Line_Options http://web.archive.org/web/20210530092017/https://developer.... (I have a super murky memory it might be me who added it there, but today I had to find SU answer mentioning it [2] to even try that) [2] https://superuser.com/questions/1691419/how-to-start-firefox-in-offline-mode-from-a-command-line https://superuser.com/questions/1691419/how-to-start-firefox... (Update) And one more thing: when using Profile Manager there is a nifty "Work offline" checkbox in there. Run firefox --profilemanager There is also checkbox "Use selected profile without asking" that when unchecked presumably adds [General] StartWithLastProfile=0 to the `<appdata>\Mozilla\Firefox\installs.ini`. I've found this handy to do if you occasionally mess with various Fx versions and want to be sure you will not unintentionally load "nightly" profile with "stable" executable.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

"I believe I have the right to control when and for what purpose the computer and software that I own communicates with third parties." Theoretically we already have this control. We can edit the Firefox source to disable the undesired traffic before compiling. In practice it takes me more time and resources to compile Firefox than it does to compile the kernel for the host OS (NetBSD). Most Firefox users probably use binaries and do not compile from source. I would prefer to see a smaller, less featureful additonal version of Firefox that compiles faster and with fewer required resources. For advanced users, this would remove the friction against making source changes and compiling as opposed to using binaries. It would also potentially open up an opportunity for others to create customised versions of Firefox with, e.g., reduced attack surface, less need for "updates" and better suited to avoiding telemetry, and internet advertising-related surveillance. The actual or effective inability to compile from source places more control with Mozilla and less control with the user. Thus we continually find Firefox users on HN pleading with Mozilla to make changes instead of making the changes themselves.