User Agent: Steps to reproduce: 1. Start Firefox ESR 17.0.7 with an empty profile. 2. Set browser.safebrowsing.enabled to false, enable HTTP and HTTPS proxy. 3. Restart the browser, observe all network connection attemps and wait. Actual results: 3. Firefox tries a connection to sb-ssl.google.com:443 and later to http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/downloads?client=navclient-auto-ffox&appver=17.0.7... Expected results: 3. No connection

Worth retesting with browser.safebrowsing.malware.enabled=false. The mentioned setting probably only disables phishing protection.

With both options set to false Firefox I cannot spot a connection to safebrowsing.clients.google.com. But it sill connects to sb-ssl.google.com:443. Just for the record: Besides those Firefox also connects to these hosts: versioncheck-bg.addons.mozilla.org:443 services.addons.mozilla.org:443 addons.mozilla.org:443

http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-esr17/source/browser/components/safebrowsing/SafeBrowsing.jsm#119 I think that code should handle your use case, and I didn't find any other callers for setKey so I'm a bit confused why it doesn't work. Bug 783047 removes the need to connect to sb-ssl.google.com entirely, so it should fix the outstanding bug, though.

I didn't manage to confirm the original report. i.e. when disabling both browser.safebrowsing.enabled and browser.safebrowsing.malware.enabled, I don't see any connection to sb-ssl.google.com being made (using Wireshark). This was on Nightly, but from the previous comment the relevant code is also in Firefox ESR 17.

Should be solved now that bug 783047 is landed.

I can't get those connections on buggy builds locally. Stefan, can you please verify that this is fixed for you in Firefox 29? http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/beta/