How to stop Firefox from making automatic connections

Some people are concerned about the connections Firefox makes to the Internet, especially when those connections are made for no apparent reason (see Mozilla's Firefox Browser Privacy Notice for additional information). This article explains various reasons why Firefox may make a connection to the Internet and how you can stop it from doing so, if you wish.

 

Table of Contents

• Automatic updates and Security
  • Auto-update checking
  • Blocklist updating
  • Anti-phishing list updating
  • Anti-malware list updating
  • Secure website certificates
• Prefetching
  • Link prefetching
  • DNS prefetching
  • Speculative pre-connections
  • Add-on list prefetching
• User-invoked content
  • Home page loading
  • Extensions
  • Live Bookmarks updating
  • Downloads restarted
  • Search plugin icon loading
  • Firefox Sync
  • Firefox Hello
• Mozilla content
  • Tiles
  • Snippets
  • Geolocation for default search engine
  • "What's new" page
  • Add-on metadata updating
• Diagnostics
• Media capabilities
  • OpenH264 codec
  • WebRTC
  • Send Video To Device
• Malware
• Loopback connection

32-bit Eagle and 64-bit Debian 8 Jessie

To install the required a 32-bit library environment to run Eagle 6 on 64-bit Jessie:

# dpkg --add-architecture i386
# apt-get update

Then install these:

build-essential
gcc-multilib
rpm
libstdc++6:i386
libgcc1:i386
zlib1g:i386
libncurses5:i386
libxrender1:i386
libXcursor2:i386
libfreetype6:i386
libfontconfig1:i386
libXi6:i386
libssl1.0.06:i38

Managing Eagle Projects with Git

Here are the commands I use to manage my Git repositories for my Eagle projects.

PROJECT_REPO is an environment variable designating my repository URL or path.  

Each project starts as a branch from a root project with a blank board or branches from another project.

Start a new Eagle project

Current directory is an empty project working directory.

git init
git remote add origin $PROJECT_REPO
git pull
git checkout origin/master
git checkout -b BRANCH-NAME

Pull an Eagle project
Current directory is an empty project working directory. 

git init
git remote add origin $PROJECT_REPO
git pull
git checkout BRANCH-NAME

Create and push a new branch
Current directory is the current project working directory.

git checkout -b NEW_BRANCH_NAME 

... make changes and commit ...

git push origin NEW-BRANCH-NAME

LibreOffice vs. the Liberty to Open the Application You Want

Occasionally LibreOffice seems determined to open PDF files with a web browser instead of the pertinent preferred application. Nosing around I learned that Libre/OpenOffice appears to be opening files thru /usr/bin/x-www-browser which links to /etc/alternatives/x-www-browser - a web browser startup script.

I instead linked /usr/bin/x-www-browser to /usr/bin/gnome-open which properly selects the gnome preferred application.