Not to be an alarmist, but the release of Firefox 34.0.5 has significantly ramped up my concern about how good a job Mozilla is doing protecting our privacy and security. In particular, the last several releases of Firefox have introduced a ton of new settings in the configuration file that are hard to understand in many cases, at least for me. On top of that, Mozilla is also becoming more aggressive in shoving certain things down our throats.
The latest switch to Yahoo as the default search engine is just one example. It's not the end of the world, of course, because you can switch your default search provider fairly easily. But if you happen to screw up your profile and have to create a new one, Yahoo will be back and it will keep coming back every time, along with advertising tiles and some other things I find annoying. In the case of Yahoo, the only way I've found to prevent it from coming back is by deleting Yahoo as a search engine entirely.
But it isn't just a question of switching your default search engine to something else. On a fresh profile in Firefox 34.0.5, open the configuration file and type in the word search. I come up with 28 distinct entries. I have 34 search entries in my regular profile, almost half of which I've changed from the defaults Firefox offers up on its own.
And that's just the search function. There are many other new entries that have been added to the configuration file in recent months. Like I said, I don't want to be alarmist because it isn't always black and white when it comes to some of these new settings. Should you enable or disable the geolocation functionality? There are pros and cons and I understand that.
But there are other settings like beacon.enabled and browser.send_pings that I don't understand as well; and Firefox isn't really being pro-active is helping me to understand these things and what theyre intended to do. Like most people, I have a real life and I dont have all time to spend getting answers to things like this.
The bottom line is I think it might be useful if we started a thread in which we share some of the changes we've made to the default Firefox configuration file and why. For example, I've made Startpage Europe the default search engine in Firefox, with Ixquick and DuckDuckGo as my fallbacks because these three search engines appear to be more privacy conscious. I could be wrong. Feel free to disagree. Thats the point of the thread.
As part of the thread, it might also be useful to exchange any articles we run across that bear on the topic. Here are a couple of links to get that started.
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thesimplecomputer.info/t ··· ak-guide»
mobile.www.rationallypar ··· ity.htmlI am NOT suggesting you run out and adopt any or all of these suggestions immediately. But perhaps we can discuss those where we agree or disagree with the author ... or are just not certain and need to be enlightened.
It's just a suggestion. Feel free to contribute if you think it's a good one.