Re: Re: Connection at browser first run or update

[Mark H Weaver]

Hi,

chippy <chippy@classictetris.net> writes:
>> > Hi all,
>> > 
>> > I noticed with the last builds, that the browser will open gnu.org
>> > on first run.

Luis Guzman <ark@switnet.org> replied:
>> That sounds like a feature Mozilla implemented and got inherited
>> downstream.

Yes, and this is the usual pattern.  In general, IceCat inherits
undesirable changes from Mozilla until we notice them and find a way to
reverse them.

>> I've seen that happening on Thunderbird/Icedove opening the donation 
>> page on first run.

chippy <chippy@classictetris.net> replied:
> I came to the same conclusion after my email.

I have also observed that after some (but not all) version updates,
IceCat automatically visits gnu.org's web site without being asked to do
so.  I agree that this is suboptimal behavior.  If you can find a way to
prevent it, please let us know.

In general, I'd prefer for IceCat to only generate network activity
that's needed to perform the actions explicitly asked for by the user,
or called for by the web sites that the user explicitly visits.

>> > It will also transparently ping gnu.org when opening about:addons.
>> > I did not investigate further...

Thanks for letting us know about this.

>> > Why is that? I (and a lot of users) did not expect a similar
>> > behavior...

I'd be grateful if you could find a way to prevent this behavior.

>> Now that you are using a newer / more advance approach you have
>> better information that previous developers did.
>> 
>> I would document it, send a patch, propose a new routine, implement 
>> locally (so my own copy have those changes), test and report back. So
>> the codebase gets improves for everyone (me included).
>> 
> I'll look into it again, but as I said I couldn't reproduce. The idea
> is to replace all the gnu.org occurrences with some counter so to have
> them all different and being able to tell one from another in one go
> (read in one build). 

That sounds like a good approach.  Please let us know what you find.

Thanks very much for your work on this.

    Best regards,
       Mark