Just got Firefox portable and fired it up, only to find it connects to various websites and services I have no intention of connecting to.
Why does Firefox portable connect to "portableapps.com, the BBC for RSS and various other places".
There is also no way to disable the RSS feed, so every time you startup the new firefox it connects to the web to tell some server you've just started up, this is not a nice feature.
Any ideas how to disable these, I want a portable app that just wakes up with a blank screen, and waits for me to tell it to connect and do things, not go out on its own and start talking to the planet.
I've lost faith in this now, you may as well add adverts!
Joe
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Do you use Firefox at all? Have you not noticed at least in the last several version they have all had a BBC RSS feed? You can remove that yourself and tell it go to a blank page on start. The original modifications are done by Mozilla and not John. I also have not seen a link to portableapps.com since the 2.0 release. I remember seeing that in the 1.5 releases but not since. I could be wrong on that but not to my knowledge. As far as I know, John can not modify the original code or include any additional sites and such than what comes with FF originally.
You have the right to remain silent. Anything you do or say will be exaggerated or mis-quoted and used against you.
They're just live bookmarks. The Getting Started and Latest News (BBC) ones are a part of every single Firefox install including regular desktop installs. The PortableApps.com bookmark and feed are the same thing and added by me with permission from Mozilla. They're just bookmarks. You can delete them (right-click and then delete).
You'll also notice a connection to Mozilla's update server to ensure it's the most recent version on startup. This is enabled by default in all Firefox installs on all platforms. You can disable this in Tools - Options - Advanced - Update.
You'll also notice a connection to download the most recent anti-phishing database (about 3 mb). This is also enabled by default in all Firefox installs on all platforms. It is not easy to disable, but you can disable it by following the directions on the Firefox Portable Support page on Performance.
Please, in the future, do your homework before making accusations.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I looked at my Firewall logs and saw all this activity, which I'd not seen on any of the previous builds, I always disable all of the updates, extensions and any other misc stuff that automatically connects to the world without my knowledge.
Thanks for all the feedback, I have already tried all the recommnedations, and still FF at startup connected, so I removed it and went back to a previous version which behaves
I did not remove the bookmarks, though I did not expect these to cause any automatic connections to any servers??? Actually on re-reading your comment John, I see the word "Live" bokmarks, maybe I need to research that.
Perhaps a warning should be posted some place, to say this behaviour happens as normal and it can be disabled by doing... etc
Thanks again all.
Joe
are very handy.
One one hand, they connect on startup to the site they are from, on the other hand, they are cool for having an eye on your favorite newspaper headlines...or the latest news from Portableapps.com.
And if you dont want them any more, just delete them.
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
A live bookmark downloads the xml file that contains the links to its related pages (e.g. the "latest Headlines" xml file links to each news story's page). The link to each xml file can be found in the bookmarks manager (since this is where they are defined). Mozilla updates the feed for the BBC live bookmark (http://fxfeeds.mozilla.com/rss20.xml), but usually the site it links to maintains it. If you don't want it, all you have to do is go into the bookmarks manager and delete the entry.
Their purpose is to show a list of links without having to actually visiting the site. That way, one can see (I'll use the news feed example), each news story's headline and decide which stories to view. I have a feed that shows the newest addons from addons.mozilla.org (don't say it, John) so I can see what's new without browsing the site and I can go to directly to an addon's page if I'm intereste.
Vintage!
Why? You already have way too many
)
(You did say John
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Ryan McCue
Person 1: Oh my god. You will never believe what just happened.
Person 2: What?
Person 1: I can't remember, I've forgotten.
"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate."
I hate this "feature". There is no need for live bookmarks to download at startup.
The users privacy should be respected. The software should not be unnecessarily announcing that the user has just open it. Software that unnecessarily send out information about what the user is dong without informed consent is called spyware.
I come back after a number of months only to have to put up with this? Ugh.
You privacy freaks drive me nuts, calling any program that does anything automatically spyware. You're downloading something; nothing is ever sent beyond a request to download a file.
If you don't want the feature, don't use it, but DO NOT complain about it. If you don't have any live bookmarks in your bookmarks list (it takes what, two seconds to delete the default ones?) and auto-update is turned off, there should be no reason for Firefox phoning home.
Come on, if you're really that paranoid, why are you using a browser at all? The minute you start browsing, you're broadcasting your IP address anyway; it's the way the Internet works.
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"You missed the bigger picture, Bruce. You always have."
- Robert Spellbinder, Spectacles: Bruce's Story
I am now educated on Live Bookmarks, still not convinced, but will experiment;
Has anyone any hints/info on where to go to learn about the technology behind the "Live" bookmarks, if I wanted to supply the Xml file from my web site, how to do that so that FF Live bookmarks would work.
I could track my own updates then... "that will convince me"
It's just a simple RSS feed. You can add live bookmarks for any site with an RSS or Feed icon into Firefox. Here's the RSS feed for PortableApps.com's news:
https://portableapps.com/feeds/general
Load that up in FF and it'll show you a formatted version of the page with an offer to create a live bookmark or subscribe to it via Bloglines, etc. If you view the source of that page, though, you'll get to see the XML file as it exists on this server.
Here's some more on Live Bookmarks:
http://johnbokma.com/firefox/rss-and-live-bookmarks.html
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I hate Firefox's generated page. It freezes the browser until it has generated it and I prefer looking at the XML source anyway, helps me learn why the timestamps are screwed... (Don't even get me started on that)
----
Ryan McCue
Person 1: Oh my god. You will never believe what just happened.
Person 2: What?
Person 1: I can't remember, I've forgotten.
"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate."