Pi-hole has helped improve my “relationship” with Firefox, or better phrased with Firefox forks like LibreWolf and Tor browser. Cool thing with Pi-hole is that you can watch the query log and see what happened in the background while you were surfing the Internet. I learned that :
-
After removing the sponsored shortcuts in Firefox and putting your own shortcuts there Firefox will make connections each time you start the browser. So, if you would have icons on your quick start page in Firefox for let’s say EFF, Lemmy, Mastodon, HackerNews, with each Firefox start up, it would query these sites. which I didn’t like so much. Since then I’ve gone back to a complete blank start page, removing search and all those quick start icons, using just toolbar folders with bookmarks.
-
Pi-hole defaults to blocking telemetry for Firefox and Thunderbird.
-
Signal uses Google servers I saw via Pi-hole. I thought that they were using Amazon servers, but looking at Wikipedia for the history of Signal hosting I learned that Signal went back to Google for hosting.
-
Firefox push notification services are hosted on Google servers. LibreWolf removes a lot of Google things that Firefox has by default, but not the push parts. With Pi-hole it is very easy to block that.
Yeah. I thought about that. When you add an icon to your rows of shortcuts in Firefox and it fails to fetch the correct icon and gives it a generic letter instead and you want to add an icon yourself you cannot just upload or insert an icon to your Firefox, you will need to point it to some web link where the remote icon is. I can imagine Firefox wants to check at each startup whether the remote icon has changed or not (Not completely unreasonable. Think about Twitter changing to X).
Come on, who are we kidding. 😄 It’s done for pings. The privacy implication is so in-your-face there’s no way they missed it. 🙂
Favicons are from 99. The technology and handling of them wasn’t developed to invade your privacy.
We’re talking about images on your homepage, which phone home every time you open the browser, and even each time you open a new tab.
You can’t possibly believe that an organization that has been making a browser for a living for decades missed the implications of that.
The new tab page is not from 99, however. And even for generic favicon handling my experience in case if bookmarks is that the bookmark won’t have the favicon of the website if it couldn’t obtain in in the moment the bookmark was created. So no, it does not seem to be an issue with the favicon system itself, but rather the new tab page.
