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by gcb0 4025 days ago
why stop there?

- telefonica service for voice chat.

- google scam site checker, phone-home component for every site you visit

- google services (the things responsible for ads no less) just so you can stream videos on android (can't even build firefox without including that SDK)

- adobe binary blob for DRM on netflix. (who even uses netflix on the browser?)

1 comments

>- google scam site checker, phone-home component for every site you visit

I don't really like it either, but that's not how it works. Firefox downloads an updated list of "non-safe" sites from Google every 30 minutes or so, and check sites against the local copy. A site get sent to Google only if there is a match in the local copy, to check that it's still "blacklisted"

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-does-phishing-and-m...

>- google services (the things responsible for ads no less) just so you can stream videos on android (can't even build firefox without including that SDK)

It's for casting videos to a Chromecast, not for streaming videos. It seems to be possible to build Firefox without it, F-Droid does so: https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=fennec&fdid=...

>- adobe binary blob for DRM on netflix. (who even uses netflix on the browser?)

I don't like it neither, but I think a small blob for DRM is better than a whole closed addon. It's awful that it got pushed to every installation tho, instead of displaying a "download" button on Netflix and similar sites.

As for your question, it seems that tons of people do so.

OK so they advertise some sites you visit to Google, not all as i said.

removing Google services: fdroid goes to great pains to do that. i was actually doing that myself before. have you ever tried? it's hours and hours wasted changing code and scripts that were originally made optional but for some reason they drippe dropped the checks (I'm still to have enough time to track the commits that did this)

drm:agree with you there, no excuse not to be a download.