OT? What has Firefox done. Unwanted synchronization

In alt.comp.os.windows-10, on Fri, 31 May 2019 18:54:40 -0400, micky
wrote:

What has Firefox done?

I just now closed it and reopened it and it wants an email address just
to get to the Firefox data on this computer.

It says this will synchronize all my devices, but I only have two of
them and I don't want them synchronized.


I did sign up for a Firefox account 18 months ago, to load data from
another computer, and I used it once, 18 months ago. But I have no idea
if that data is updated and it no longer has anything to do with any
email address.

Is there a way out of this?

As you read, earlier in the thread, the problem went away.

But then Firefox was slow so I restarted it and it did so totally
without any existing profile. No tabs and I'm sure nothing else. Not
even the search box to the right of the location box, and when I did a
search in the location box or google.com, it only gave me about 5
choices for search engines instead of the 17 I'd set up.

But I still used FF for an hour and opened about 6 tabs. But nothing
related to the first 2-line paragraph at the top here.

Adwcleaner said that it was necessary to reboot to complete quarantening
so I did that, and today when I restarted, everything was back to
normal, except:

Adwcleaner still showed a box saying that I have to reboot, even though
I just did.

Macrium has been showing a box every 10 minutes saying an update is
available. Sometimes I ignore it, sometimes I click on it, but it keeps
coming back. OTher than this, everythign seems alright again. And it
appears Adwcleaner fixed the problem (at least until I restart FF!)
Thanks again, Paul.

In alt.comp.os.windows-10, on Mon, 03 Jun 2019 07:52:43 -0400, micky
wrote:


Macrium has been showing a box every 10 minutes saying an update is
available. Sometimes I ignore it, sometimes I click on it, but it keeps
coming back. OTher than this, everythign seems alright again. And it
appears Adwcleaner fixed the problem (at least until I restart FF!)
Thanks again, Paul.

The Macrium box gave the name of the process that was causing it.
macrium watchdog or monitor or something, so I ended that process.

But it came back soon after. So I ended it and the other two macrium
processes. How annoying the box was. It doesn't do macrium any good
with me to annoy me.

In alt.comp.os.windows-10, on Fri, 31 May 2019 18:54:40 -0400, micky
wrote:

What has Firefox done?

I just now closed it and reopened it and it wants an email address just
to get to the Firefox data on this computer.

It says this will synchronize all my devices, but I only have two of
them and I don't want them synchronized.


I did sign up for a Firefox account 18 months ago, to load data from
another computer, and I used it once, 18 months ago. But I have no idea
if that data is updated and it no longer has anything to do with any
email address.

Is there a way out of this?

Follow-up.

It seemed for a while that the problem was that when I closed FF, it
wasn't fully closed. Even though it wasn't in the task bar in win10,
and I think it wasn't in first section of the Task Manager list of
processes, it might have been in the second section. When it offerred
to close it, or I closed it with Task Manager, the next time Firefox
opened correctly.

But since then, I found a problem opening FF even after Windows had been
closed and the computer turned off. The first time it had 3 tabs, one
or two blank ones and one talking about new FF features.

I tried over and over, opening it with the icon pinned to the taskbar
which always worked in the past, closing it in between, closing it with
the X in the upper right or with Task Manager. Task Manager said that
4 or 5 subtasks were open for FF, even I think in the past it was only
1. it wasn't right in that it had no tab with previous tabs, not
bookmark bar, no right-hand search box, and it was surely missing
history, bookmarks, etc, though I didn't check.
Finally, while it was open and looking like that, I clicked on a link
in Eudora and instead of opening a tab in the open window, it opened a
new window that looked normal. Then I closed the first window and it's
been fine since then (though I don't think I've closed it since then.)

(5 subtasks, processes are open now, even though I have only 3 windows
open, so I guess 5 is the new normal.)

micky wrote:


(5 subtasks, processes are open now, even though I have only 3 windows
open, so I guess 5 is the new normal.)

Even when Firefox is "empty", "not doing anything", it
has multiple processes open, and they communicate with
one another via "named pipes".

Part of the reason for this, is to provide a container for
Flash content, so that if the Flash content crashes... the
browser keeps running.

It's also partially to compete with Chrome, as Chrome
was using multiple processes too.

I couldn't begin to guess where the number "5" comes
from, but the number is adjustable in the preferences.
You can actually set it higher.

Like a chess game, the tasks could have roles, such
as a King and a Queen and Three Pawns. And the adjustable
number of tasks could mean more or fewer Pawns. There
is presumably some minimal number for Electrolysis.

It's also apparently possible to shut Electrolysis off
and return to just one Firefox task. When you do that,
if there is a Adobe Flash issue, then the browser
could crash rather than "handle it". Or so the
story goes.

Watching with Task Manager, I was seeing excessive shutdown
time as an issue with the new Firefox design. As programming
patterns go, this isn't a popular pattern for Windows, and
I've not heard of any infrastructure intended for the purpose.
No "fork" as such, maybe no Process Groups ? On some
OSes, you can kill at the PID level, but also killPG or
kill an entire process group (which is good if there
is a fork bomb running on the machine). In the case of Firefox,
that would cause all five items to exit at the same
instant in time, without a lot of ceremonies.

Paul