Firefox calling home excessively?

Help Community Help
1

Anyone noticed a lot of entries in Pihole Log calling home to Mozilla, or Firefox's servers?

Not sure if Firefox is popular on this Discourse but it is popular at our place and in the past year I started to see way too many entries in the Pihole log

Here are some of the domains:
detectportal.firefox.com
firefox.settings.services.mozilla.com
classify-client.services.mozilla.com
content-signature-2.cdn.mozilla.net
shavar.services.mozilla.com
(blocked shavar.prod.mozaws.net)
push.services.mozilla.com

I don't have any captive portals on my network so I wanted to see what happends if I block

detectportal.firefox.com

and PIhole Log is just going crazy, looks like Firefox is retrying that connection every other second

2021-02-08
09:39:28 A (IPv4) detectportal.firefox.com Workstation-11 Blocked
(exact blacklist)
2021-02-08
09:39:27 A (IPv4) detectportal.firefox.com Workstation-11 Blocked
(exact blacklist)
2021-02-08
09:39:26 A (IPv4) detectportal.firefox.com Workstation-11 Blocked
(exact blacklist)

I know this forum is about Pihole and not Firefox but if anyone is interested, disabling it in Firefox-about:config seems not working

network.captive-portal-service.enabled false

I still see the above entries in the log.

Does it seem my Firefox is calling home excessively?

2

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1251590

3

That would make sense once in a while but why constantly hammering the pihole?

I took at the log on a different pihole with different firefox and I see the same log entries.

Here are few additional domains from the log

blocklists.settings.services.mozilla.com
blocklist.addons.mozilla.org
support.mozilla.org
vpn.mozilla.org

this one seems to get negative exposure already because I see it actually on a handful of existing Pihole Blocklists (.oisd.nl. w3kbl).

incoming.telemetry.mozilla.org

These are kind of interesting:

normandy.cdn.mozilla.net
normandy-cdn.services.mozilla.com

What is normandy ? Maybe these guys are onto something?

OJFord on > May 4, 2019

Studies and Normandy are different things, the former often using the latter. Only 'studies' has a checkbox in about:preferences, 'Normandy' is hidden in about:config .

In summary, so one of their domains above is already on few blocklists.
question is do the other domains deserve to be on a blocklist too?

4

You should talk to the maintainers of the lists where the others are already on. Pi-hole has no influence on them and stays politically neutral. This is also the reason why there are no default blacklisted or whitelisted domains. Only community projects.

5

@coro, thank you for your suggestions,. I didn't get a response from the list maintainer,

This discourse seems to be bigger so I hope someone might have encounter the same odd behaviour.

6

This topic was automatically closed 21 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.