Remove safebrowsing for real Topic is solved

[Wuzzy]

I have heard Pale Moon does not make use of the “safebrowsing” feature seen in Firefox. In Firefox feature basically talks home to Google to check if a certain website can be “trusted” and if not Firefox displays a big fat red warning instead of the website.
Does Pale Moon really not use this feature? I don't really believe it because it looks like it still does:

- In about:config I see many settings starting with “browser.safebrowsing”
- browser.safebrowsing.enabled was set to true initially
- In the preferences, security tab I see two checkboxes related to “blocking websites”, these are part of the safebrowsing feature AFAIK

Maybe the feature is gone but the remains of it (checkboxes, about:config settings) still are there. Then I simply suggest to remove the remains as well, I see no point in them. Makes sense, right?

[Moonchild]

I'm not sure what you are looking at because safebrowsing is completely disabled in release builds. There are no UI controls and there are no preferences related to safebrowsing as a result.

What version/build are you using?

[Wuzzy]

I got version 26.3.3 (x64).

[New Tobin Paradigm]

Moonchild, didn't we cripple safe browsing anyway or is it still merely ifdef'd. Either way it isn't in the compiled product so I don't know why you are on about this "Wuzzy".

[CharmCityCrab]

Are there any alternate providers of safebrowsing lists where the list of sites that the feature should block can be automatically downloaded and refreshed on a regular basis and the check occurs on your hard drive rather than sending the addresses you visit individually to Google and having Google check in the "cloud"?

Would that kind of thing be a feature that Pale Moon would be interested in adding if it is available or if it becomes available?

It seems like such a provider and the tweaking of the browser feature in that direction might eliminate the privacy concerns people have with the Google safebrowsing process and still give us a similar safety advantage to what users of other browsers that use the safebrowsing feature get. In short, most of the good, without most of the bad.

[New Tobin Paradigm]

There is no real way to eliminate bias unless we do it in-house which isn't on the table because we don't have the time and resources to moderate the entire internet. And even if we did.. I am sure we would be accused of leaking privacy, tracking, and being biased against specific sites.. Regardless of the facts.

The kind of users who are uber concerned about these aspects are ones who will never be satisfied in any event. Pale Moon as a web client is designed to get you to content not be your mother. No one entity should be allowed to decided what and where you can visit on the internet.

[Moonchild]

Wuzzy. Are you using release builds or are you talking about one you built from source, since that's what you hinted at in your e-mail...

If you build from source you HAVE to configure your build process and take responsibility for what you include or don't include in the end result.

[Wuzzy]

Well, yeah, I have building from source. To be precise, I used an AUR package (26.3.3-1):

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/palemoon/

Sorry for forgetting this. If my distro would provide a binary package I would have used that one instead, of course.

However, I wonder why a build configuration option should magically make a feature re-appear. If a feature is gone for good, no build config should change that.

The package maintainers have been notified, but I am not sure if it was really their fault. Strange.

[New Tobin Paradigm]

The current Arch package maintainer has a rather not sane mozconfig.. I have reached out to him to see if we can get this and some other things settled.

Either way since he is aware of at least the Safe Browsing situation now I am locking this topic as RESOLVED FIXED.. or something