Where did you install Firefox from? Help Mozilla uncover 3rd party websites that offer problematic Firefox installation by taking part in our campaign. There will be swag, and you'll be featured in our blog if you manage to report at least 10 valid reports!

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

How do I get Firefox to start up without trying to dialout? (Work offline setting is not saved on restart.)

more options

My home page is a local file. I do not want my browser dialing out at start up. It is hard to tell if there is a trojan or virus when it tries to dial out before I try to load a page. I turn off most automatic updates on extensions that have a setting for that. I do not have a problem editing a configuration file if needed.

My home page is a local file. I do not want my browser dialing out at start up. It is hard to tell if there is a trojan or virus when it tries to dial out before I try to load a page. I turn off most automatic updates on extensions that have a setting for that. I do not have a problem editing a configuration file if needed.

All Replies (6)

more options

I can't be certain, but I think this is a Windows setting. I have never seen anything relating to this in Firefox, in any case.

more options

Nope. It's not a Windows issue - it's Firefox.

For clarity, Firefox causes the dialup dialog to open. It's not actually dialing out because I have to click the button on the dialup connection dialog. Still annoying, and bad behaving application IMO. It was in the code that Firefox inherited in the prior version (can't recall what it was called). Firefox does it even with no extensions installed, but some extensions like Forecastfox make it worse.

Mickeyme modificouno o

more options
more options
more options

Thanks, the-edmeister, that autodial-helper setting should solve the connection dialog. (I set it to false but haven't restarted yet.)

But the underlying cause will still be there, and it will do its thing if I'm already online. I could not track all the destinations, 2 show up only in firewall, one of those was UDP, but the other was TCP/IP I think (the firewall doesn't log every connection). Two other connections show up in my proxy log. One of those is a GET/POST of 106 bytes to ocsp.godaddy.com. It uses what looks like a unique ID called Etag. And it does this on every start up of Firefox. I can block that particular server, but it just gives the impression of behaving like spyware, which kills any trust I may have had. (I can remember not so long ago when well-behaved applications would not even check for updates without asking first.)

On a happy note, I went through most of my installed extensions, and most are not misbehaving. I uninstalled a couple that were and found a way to reconfigure another to get the info from a local file.

more options

You made no mention of having any extensions installed in your initial posting, so you might want to start with a fresh Profile and see if that solves your problem. There are so many crap extensions available these days that disabling specific extensions might not help you accurately determine which ones are causing your problem.