advertisement in packaged software (e.g. Firefox)

[Simo Sorce]

On Wed, 2014-02-12 at 10:32 -0600, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 18:25:48 +0200,
>    Nikos Roussos <comzeradd at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> >On Wed, 2014-02-12 at 16:58 +0100, H. Guémar wrote:
> >> My *personal* opinion is that we should disable this kind of feature
> >> by default.
> >
> >On a side note, why not disable also Google as the default searchbox
> >engine and replace it with a non-profit one?
> >
> >(I'm not stating my opinion here, just trying to figure which is our
> >overall attitude against promoted default brands on software we deliver
> >to users.)
> 
> I think the difference is that google search isn't used until you actually 
> do a search. So you can not use it fairly easily. Connecting to web pages 
> before you get a chance to disable that feature is a privacy problem unless 
> those web pages are local copies. I already have a problem with firefox 
> loading a mozilla page after update. (You can turn this off, but it isn't 
> well documented.) I also have a problem with doing revocation lookups 
> to check for revoked certificates by default. And for that matter with 
> loading the Fedora welcome page when you first run firefox of Fedora 
> systems.

Well ok if we go down this road, then you should also ask to disable the
not very well know call home to check for malware feature. That feature
means every Mozilla browser *always* pings Google to check for
blacklisted sites and I am not sure what it sends there.

Unfortunately you have to go in about:config to change anything about
that IIRC.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York