Pale Moon forum

There is a gHacks article here about a new feature in Firefox 32: checking downloads against Google's application reputation database.

Am I correct in thinking that this is something that will never find its way into Palemoon?

Another question: in the comments section of that article, somebody who says that they use Palemoon mentioned that they set the following entries in about:config to false:

• services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.safebrowsing.enabled
  services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.safebrowsing.malware.enabled

What exactly do these entries do when set to true?

Also I noticed in about:config some entries that have a Google URL under Value. Two examples are browser.safebrowsing.reportURL and browser.safebrowsing.updateURL.

What are these for?

That "feature" won't be in Pale Moon. Never.

Otherwise, see http://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=4972

Thanks supernova, I've already read that post, but most of it went over my head. So is this already disabled? Both services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.safebrowsing.enabled and
services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.safebrowsing.malware.enabled are still set to true on my computer.

Also would it hurt anything to delete the Google URLs?

Now Firefox will tell me what I must download and what I cannot download? Gee this is the last time I use Firefox *EVEN* in offline computers. I will move to Opera in the old Athlon XP computer.

helloimustbegoing wrote:Also would it hurt anything to delete the Google URLs?

It's not the "services.sync.prefs" settings you need to set to false - those are for Sync - but rather these: browser.safebrowsing.enabled
browser.safebrowsing.malware.enabled
and they can be set to false just by unchecking *both* of these in Options/Security:
Block reported attack sites
Block reported web forgeries

I used to edit, rather than delete, the google URLs in config, replacing them with a misspelling like go~ogle
or anything that isn't a real site. That way I could easily find the ones I changed if I needed to. It never broke the browser for me. It did break some functions of some webpages and addons, but that is the intent really. But editing the config settings gets tiring because they get updated and rewritten.

I also blocked google.com in Proxomitron on my old PC. That stopped all access from any browser set to use that proxy. And I even put google.com and several other variants in my hosts file. That stops all internet access to those domains. The hosts file is harder to edit because of access restrictions.

You can use an addon like BlockSite and put google.com on the blacklist. That would be roughly equivalent to doing the same in Proxomitron, except you need the addon installed in each browser/profile.

Warning: once you start trying to block google, you'll go mad because it is so pervasive now.

mikeysc wrote:Warning: once you start trying to block google, you'll go mad because it is so pervasive now.

ajax.googleapis.com is one of the more page-breaking and often seen

Blocking google entirely needs a kind of faith to be able to think sometimes "if that webpage don't work because of me blocking google, then let's use something else/nothing"

I'm very familiar with ajax and several other googlethis or blah.google domain flavors from seeing, and usually blocking, them in NoScript and RequestPolicy and certain other ones caught in another addon that is not liked too well here. I know one site that won't work properly without google fonts which is just nuts to me. What kind of numbskulls set up sites like that? If you can find a site that still has decent maps that don't come from google, be sure to patronize that site.