this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2024
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Privacy
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Yeah. I thought about that. When you add an icon to your rows of shortcuts in Firefox and it fails to fetch the correct icon and gives it a generic letter instead and you want to add an icon yourself you cannot just upload or insert an icon to your Firefox, you will need to point it to some web link where the remote icon is. I can imagine Firefox wants to check at each startup whether the remote icon has changed or not (Not completely unreasonable. Think about Twitter changing to X).
Come on, who are we kidding. ๐ It's done for pings. The privacy implication is so in-your-face there's no way they missed it. ๐
Favicons are from 99. The technology and handling of them wasnโt developed to invade your privacy.
We're talking about images on your homepage, which phone home every time you open the browser, and even each time you open a new tab.
You can't possibly believe that an organization that has been making a browser for a living for decades missed the implications of that.
on my firefox those are all favicons. when you say that "they" phone home, what's happening is that the browser is requesting the favicon for the sponsored links so it shows the right mini logo above the name of the website. if you want to disable this behavior, you can simply disable sponsored links with the gear menu in the top right corner.
if you want to disable all favicons, disable browser.chrome.favicons (old?) and/or browser.chrome.site_icons and browser.shell.shortcutFavicons in about:config, clear your cache and restart.
i'm pretty sure that firefox pulls favicons from cache for favorites or recents or whatever, but i haven't checked.