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Google cookie shows up in my system after using Firefox even though I have not gone to Google.

misterpipps
misterpipps
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Hello Mozilla support community,

I want nothing to do with Google. My homepage and preferred search engine is DuckDuckGo. When I open a Firefox browser window I somehow end up with a google.com cookie in my system.

Picture this.. You are at your desktop. You open a Firefox web browser window by clicking on the Firefox icon. The window opens up to your homepage which happens to be DuckDuckGo. Without doing anything else you then click the 'X' in the upper right corner of the window. After closing the page you then run Cache Cleaner and it finds and removes a google.com cookie. Repeat these steps with the same result.

Can anyone tell me why I am getting a google.com cookie in my machine when I open a Firefox browser window?

I have removed the integrated search bar that is normally at the top of the page, but here is an interesting tidbit.. I suspected the search bar as the culprit and so I added the search bar back to my Firefox and when hovering my cursor over the search bar it says 'Search using Yahoo' ..so Google isn't even the active search engine in the search bar. What gives? Where is this google.com cookie coming from?

Hello Mozilla support community, I want nothing to do with Google. My homepage and preferred search engine is DuckDuckGo. When I open a Firefox browser window I somehow end up with a google.com cookie in my system. Picture this.. You are at your desktop. You open a Firefox web browser window by clicking on the Firefox icon. The window opens up to your homepage which happens to be DuckDuckGo. Without doing anything else you then click the 'X' in the upper right corner of the window. After closing the page you then run Cache Cleaner and it finds and removes a google.com cookie. Repeat these steps with the same result. Can anyone tell me why I am getting a google.com cookie in my machine when I open a Firefox browser window? I have removed the integrated search bar that is normally at the top of the page, but here is an interesting tidbit.. I suspected the search bar as the culprit and so I added the search bar back to my Firefox and when hovering my cursor over the search bar it says 'Search using Yahoo' ..so Google isn't even the active search engine in the search bar. What gives? Where is this google.com cookie coming from?

All Replies (4)

Scott
Scott
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Check out bug 1008706. It's related to safe browsing, and is a known issue.

jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
  • Top 25 Contributor
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Even though Google sets a cookie when Firefox retrieves the safe browsing files, those should not be visible when you visit web pages in Firefox. By design there are separate "cookie jars" for those two things.

Of course, I'm not sure how you can test that without actually visiting a Google site and inspecting the headers for the first request.

misterpipps
misterpipps Tompon'ny fanontaniana
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Okay, thank you for the info and the link, Scott. Very helpful.

So as I see it, if I want to use Firefox with Safe Browsing enabled, then I'm forced to interact with Google. That's a really strange situation there and I'm not entirely sure why Mozilla has it working in this way. The indestructibility of this cookie is also of concern. Time to search for a new web browser.

I wonder if Mozilla has been served with any NSL's.. rhetorical question of course as they couldn't answer it if they wanted to.

jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
  • Top 25 Contributor
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Hi misterpipps, I'm pretty sure that Internet Explorer's built-in URL checker is completely independent of Google.

If you are looking for a Firefox option, you could substitute a third party service for SafeBrowsing:

Of course, there are non-free options as well from the major security vendors.