Firefox wants to connect to quite a lot of services. And it's highly recommended to read the article How to stop Firefox from making automatic connections, in which Mozilla explains and discloses a lot of these.
The article gives an impression of how contemporary software developers perceive their authority or privilege to access the user's Internet connection and whatever environmental footprint follows from these pingbacks, updates etc.
I'd like to point out the following:
- These decisions take the user's bandwidth for granted by default
- Connection retries, polling intervals etc. can be arbitrary and non-configurable.
Taking a user's bandwidth for granted
Recall that Firefox isn't the only software installed on a device or computer. Nowadays, software developers increasingly see their projects as outside or above an ecosystem and want them distributed in entire sandboxes (Flatpak, Snap etc). The decision of Firefox surely isn't unique.
And one of the peculiar things about this decision is that most systems already have for instance the network hotspot detection built-in. I have seen it on all major platforms: Mac, Windows and Ubuntu. Firefox still floods "detectportal.firefox.com" with requests.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.