bump any interest in this?
On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 1:39 PM, Orchidaceae Phalaenopsis <[email protected]> wrote: > Dear Rubin, > > Congratulations! I wish you many happy years to come! > > I have recently seen firefox adding more and more unnecessary and > dangerous things so I have decide to work on a version of firefox > which deletes them. > > Then I discovered Icecat which shares a lot of my goals and I was able > to benefit from its source code. Thank you very much! > > Here are the components I propose for deletion and why: > > * EME/DRM - [freedom] - This is a sandbox intended to run some kind of > nasty binary from adobe used to block users from having full control > over videos they watch. > * NewTab - [freedom/privacy] - The "newtab" has been getting sponsored > adverts being put into it. It is a danger to privacy because when the > mouse hovers over them a connection is made to the advertisers page. > * HealthReport - [privacy] - Turned this off by default. I do not > believe something like this that reports statistics about usage should > be on by default. > * WebGL - [security] - Turned this off by default. The security > dangers of having this on are too high. > * Pocket - [freedom] - Pocket seems to be some kind of 3rd party > "cloud" service. This is a danger to freedom. > * Hello!/Loop - [superfluous] - I think you can technically run your > own loop server and all the source code is available so this is not a > freedom concern but in any case this is not required to browse the > web. > > To delete EME I did an rm -r on all the relevant directories, added > ac_add_options --disable-eme to the mozconf and cleaned up any > dangling references to the EME stuff. I think it is important that the > code itself not be compiled into the program even if it is not used. > "dead" code has been used in security vulnerabilities in the past. > > For NewTab I blanked out the XML inside content/newtab/newTab.xul and > deleted the unneeded files. > > The patch for HealthReport off-by-default is based on icecat, since > icecat already does this! > > To set WebGL off by default I edited modules/libpref/init/all.js. > > Pocket and Hello! were removed by rm -r'ing the modules and then > cleaning up dangling references: > > rm -r ./browser/components/pocket/ > > rm -rf ./browser/components/loop/ > rm ./browser/base/content/browser-loop.js > > -------------- > > I am keen on learning about new candidates for removal. I have heard > that firefox will soon search users history and provide adverts based > on this - I intend to produce a patch/script to remove that too. > > I have included some patches and scripts here which I hope may be of > use or interested to folks. > > * https://github.com/orchid-hybrid/cozy-cub/tree/master -- http://gnuzilla.gnu.org
