Firefox is taking notes and phoning home

Not sure about this

Yesterday there was some concern raised over at Reddit because someone had noticed that both of Mozilla’s flagship products, Firefox and Thunderbird, call home every 24-hours. This happens regardless of whether you go into the Firefox preferences and disable all of the different types of updates.

Now I am a huge fan of Firefox, from a both a web developing (the web developer, measure-it and color picker extensions literally save me hours a week) and a user point of view it is simply the best browser out there but any software that sends data without my opting in is not a good thing.

The reason, apparently, is to stop people using extensions with security flaws, of which there are 5 at present. This doesn’t explain this:

I think the thing that caused the biggest stir is the fact that with each request Firefox also sends information including what version of the browser you’re using, what operating system you’re running, and other info that they can use to figure out how many active users they have.

Me? I will still use Firefox, version 3 is superb – version 2 on steroids, but this is a bit worrying and certainly warrants watching. i will be altering the about.config file though

In all fairness It is possible to disable this ‘feature’ :

This feature can be disabled by going through the about:config and searching for the extensions.blocklist.enabled option. If you set that value to false Firefox will stop phoning home, but you should probably think twice before doing this. A few years ago Mozilla created the block list as a way for them to centrally disable extensions if they are found to be malicious or cause instability in the browser.