Why does Opera open connections to bookmarked web-pages at start-up?

[bill-g]

bill-g last edited by

I have Opera 37.0.2178.43 and immediately after start-up it opens a bunch of connections to sites that I have bookmarked. Even sites that I have not visited for months.
It seems totally unnecessary.
Why does it do that and how do I stop it from doing that?

[lando242]

lando242 last edited by

Can you explain what you mean by connections? Does it open the webpage?

[bill-g]

bill-g last edited by

No it does not open anything that you can see in Opera itself.
I'm using " NetworkTrafficView.exe" that shows all network connections going on in real time.

[A Former User]

A Former User last edited by

It might be that you've overlooked some site permissions there. Or it might be not.

The thing is, some sites might request some stuff being updated since you first visited them and either gave your permission or not denied some. Or overlooked, or there's stuff that might be updated by default: it's either a site's deficiency to require an explicit user permission, or just some stuff the browser bookmarks manager usually does - updating tiles, thumbnails, favicons, some such. In the latter case you might seek to find some settings in your browser - if there are such.

[bill-g]

bill-g last edited by

Joshl, if a web-page can set Opera to make requests or updates from their site each time a start Opera, it sounds like a bad thing, a security or integrity issue to me. If that's the case then I really want to know how to block that.

Once I have closed the tab for a web-page the connection to that page should be terminated for any further communication, isn't it?

Why should bookmarks make requests?

[blackbird71]

blackbird71 last edited by

Depending on design or usage, a browser might need to update the icon associated with a bookmark if that icon or its storage file has been deleted. Likewise for a bookmark that happens to also be associated with a site which is part of a speeddial or thumbnail preview display. Beyond that, if a bookmark is coincidentally associated with something else wired into a browser (such as default search engine, default speeddial, etc.), a browser may auto-update data for that functionality upon startup.

[bill-g]

bill-g last edited by

Thank you for replies. Is there anyway to turn off these auto-updates (speed-dial, bookmarks etc.) at start-up of Opera other than deleting the bookmarks?
I want Opera to start quietly.

[donq]

donq last edited by

It's quite interesting actually. I installed fiddler and there is precisely one bookmark, which is always queried at startup - and this is probabaly only bookmark, which refers to page, which is disabled to cache at all (Cache-Control: no-store, ...). I have no speed dial entries

Looks like Opera is just updating expired (or not locally stored) bookmarks thumbnails.

I would like to see Opera devs response here - and of course such behavior is bad; bookmarks thumbnails should be made static independent of linked site caching properties.
Or is that some security consideration - if page is not allowed to store, then its thumbnail will never be stored either? In this case Opera should offer some options (allow save image) for bookmark, because querying sensitive page every time is IMO even worse than storing it locally.

Not that our local rainfall radar image (which is that specific page) needs to be disabled from storing anyway

(edit: I'm on latest dev version 39.0.2245.0 - if this behavior depends on version.)

[bill-g]

bill-g last edited by

I've seen the same on both Opera 35 and 37 donq.

Maybe this settings page in Opera can fix it: "opera://flags/". I tried a little but had no luck.

It does not seem to be many Opera super experts here that can help.

[leocg]

leocg Moderator Volunteer last edited by

Maybe this settings page in Opera can fix it: "opera://flags/". I tried a little but had no luck.

It's not a settings page but a page for experiments to be turned on or off during the test period.

[bill-g]

bill-g last edited by

Okay, so no use for those those "flags" I guess. Thank's leocg.

Well, nothing to do about this then it seems. There are bigger problems to deal with I suppose.

[bill-g]

bill-g last edited by

Okay, so finally I dived into it myself and fixed it. Apparently if the bookmarks are moved from the root into a folder and from Speed Dial to the Bookmarks folder with the Heart-icon (Looks almost like Speed Dial) it got quiet. So no more unwanted internet-traffic at start-up of Opera (for me at least). Not until I open a web-page.

And yeah this is with Opera 35, I reverted back from 37 for some reason (I forgot now).