Disable Firefox Hello (FF35+)

[Midknyte]

After upgrading Firefox, you might have gotten a prompt from your firewall. This was probably due to the Firefox Hello Video Chat feature.

For more info on Hello:
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/0...-as-in-person/

If you actually use it, that's fine. If you don't, you can disable Hello:

1. Open Firefox
2. Type about:config in the address bar, press enter
3. In the Search bar, type loop.enabled
4. Double-click loop.enabled to set value false

You can also remove the Hello icon (smiley face) from your navigation bar.

1. Open Firefox
2. Right-click on the navigation bar and click Customize...
3. Drag the Hello icon into the Additional Tools and Features box
4. Click Exit Customize

[fink]

Thanks for the about:config info. I noticed it's annoying little happy face there the other day and dragged it kicking and screaming away to the dungeon of other unused FF tool icons.

[Midknyte]

dragged it kicking and screaming away to the dungeon of other unused FF tool icons.

Yup. I did that when FF35 came out, but it reappeared when I upgraded to FF36. I didn't get a prompt from the firewall with FF35, but I did with FF36.

[Train]

THANK YOU!

[Midknyte]

NP. I was annoyed by the firewall popup, but other people might have gotten freaked out.

[Train]

Up dated to 36 and that change held Disabled.

[HAN]

IMO, this insanity of browsers needing to be more than browsers needs to stop!!

Opera went nuts and included Unite, which was a web server of all things. Like Hello, Unite messed with the Windows Firewall too. Fortunately, Unite is dead as the versions of Opera that ran it are now in an abandoned branch.

I said it elsewhere.

To Firefox developers... Drop Hello!! FaceTime, Skype and Hangouts has this already covered! If you want to really accomplish something, get the multi-process version of Firefox perfected (Electrolysis.)

[Midknyte]

Agreed. They should have spent their time making Firefox faster and use less memory.

[HAN]

As part of the Hello debacle (IMO), installing Firefox now pokes 2 holes in the Windows Firewall (for Hello connectivity.) If you delete the new 2 inbound firewall rules, they come back the next time you install FF. I learned that if you change the rules from Allow to Block, that seems to stick.

[Midknyte]

Thanks, HAN. That's why I'm sticking to ESR for now

FF37 also added the browser.casting.enabled = false option in about:config.

[Sal_gal]

I stopped using FF and am using Cyberfox. There were soooo many issues with Firefox (slow, sluggish, crashed, plug-ins, all sorts of issues) .... that I downloaded and am using Cyberfox 32bit with my 64 bit computer.
I don't trust FF anymore.