Epic Privacy Browser Forums

filofox

Guest

Pin to taskbar

Hi,

Like the idea, but getting annoyed that it keeps pinning itself to my taskbar -- I can unpin it in the usual way, but a few hours later it's back again.

Please stop this. Thanks!

alok

Administrator

Re: Pin to taskbar

Sorry about that - for some reason we can't reproduce the repinning, BUT we're getting a lot of complaints about this and have some idea what could be causing it...we're investigating!!

sai

Guest

Re: Pin to taskbar

Can you tell us your system configuration, we tried to reproduce this bug, but we could not produce this.

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http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013 … ensorship/

PerlDiver

Guest

Re: Pin to taskbar

[I've revised this; the language in early drafts was way too strong.]

Well, I'm getting it, too... every time the machine sleeps, hibernates, reboots, or I log out and log back in again, there's Epic back in the taskbar.

Why is there a "feature" to cause it to pin itself in the first place? That very fact makes me suspicious, raising doubts about the motives of the developers (but not in earnest) . "What else are they doing without asking?" I don't believe that any of the following is going on; I have no evidence for it; just my security-minded mind... so please don't hold this comment against me; for the protection of capital-P Privacy we should all be at least mindful of such considerations.

Go ahead, call me paranoid. If I wasn't paranoid, I wouldn't be trying out Epic. If I were the NSA or any other governmental agency whose mission is to know what people want kept secret (or a commercial venture with the same mission, for that matter -- looking at you, DoubleClick), what easier, lazier way is there than to tout a browser as privacy-oriented, and then back-door it in some way? I'm sure that 90+% of those who install Epic are not going to bother to read the source code; and of those who do, how many will likely have the expertise to detect Trojan features that professional spies have made efforts to obfuscate? Those features wouldn't even need to exist yet; even those who analyze the source once aren't likely to do so for every software update -- and the underlying Chrome platform iterates versions often.

My point is that, because it can stimulate such thoughts, a behavior like self-pinning is exactly the kind of poorly thought-out idea that will hurt adoption of Epic.

Here's my system configuration: box has 2 4-core Intel Xeon E5320 procs and 4 GB RAM (yeah, I know that's not much -- but between you and me, I don't think the re-pinning is a hardware problem), an NVidia graphics card, running 64-bit Windows 7 with Service Pack 1. If you need more specific information, tell me which of the several ways to get it from Windows you'd like me to use.

Last edited by PerlDiver (2013-09-19 16:09:22)

alok

Administrator

Re: Pin to taskbar

Thanks for the feedback & your thoughts!  Very much appreciate your passion for privacy and strong feelings -- we feel the same way or we wouldn't have been working day&night for the last twelve months on Epic!!  We understand your concerns.  We'll address them more below, but the main thing we can tell you is we're a small team and nothing's ever perfect - the more bugs you and everyone reports, the better we can make Epic.  We're trying to be as transparent as we can about what we do, what we don't do, who we are, etc. - because Epic doesn't belong to us but to everyone & the community.  I and the team members just work here :-)

Thanks for the details on when it's repinning -- seems like all the time -- strange we're not able to reproduce this, but we're hearing this issue from many.  We haven't knowingly changed anything in the chromium behaviour.  The pinning upon install is default chromium behaviour (chrome does this on install for example).  The repinning we believe is being caused by Epic's clearing out data on close.  Whenever you close Epic, it deletes *everything* - we believe there is some preference in some file which is getting deleted which then resets chromium to believe that it's just been installed and thus to pin itself to the taskbar.  We're working to rectify this.  Should be fixed in an update early next week we hope.  Nothing in chromium is ever simple which is why it's taking a few days!!

We're trying to be as transparent as possible.  We also are designing Epic so it can be tested - for example to make sure no unusual calls are going out to our or any other servers, anyone can use tools like WireShark or LittleSnitch or others.  Some users doing exactly that found calls trying to get a safebrowsing db, code we hadn't deleted in the release version - now fixed in an update.  Going through the source code is another way -- though chromium is huge, but important that all of us can check things out.  In terms of our team & such, we're very open and transparent, I'm the founder & CEO and I make my email public & do get dozens of emails a day from our users (which is great actually - do write me, not quite dozens but quite a few emails!).  All our development is in India through our Indian entity.   

We have ideas for the future for how we can be less vulnerable to any compromise in privacy or security e.g. have builds done with citizens from multiple non-surveillance states, etc. -- in fact, we should keep collecting such ideas here.  But we feel something that provides a high level of privacy and works pretty well (hope that's fair to say) is much better than something perfect which may never exist -- but with your help, Epic most certainly can keep getting more "epic"! 

Thanks as always for sharing your thoughts & feedback & letting us know what we can do better!

PerlDiver

Guest

Re: Pin to taskbar

I've done some web research on how and when other programs do this on purpose. There's mention of both Firefox and Chrome pinning themselves upon being selected by the user as the default browser. (Usually, this happens at the end of installation.) There are some Epic keys in the Registry that might be inherited from Chrome and perhaps related to this issue:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Clients\StartMenuInternet\Epic Privacy Browser.2HWOP2JV2NGYBXMEFJCMIJ6AFI\InstallInfo\ReinstallCommand  -- has a value that includes the command-line option "-make-default-browser"

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Epic\InstallerError -- Does this represent an erroneous report of a failed install?  It has a value of '1', even though Epic has installed and is working correctly.

I'm guessing this is an inherited Chrome behavior that has not been adequately turned off in Epic, or whose suppression is being interfered with by something Epic is doing differently -- if, for example, there's code in Chrome to look for some particular bit of tracking data that is deleted by Epic as part of its privacy cleanup (or not deleted by it, for some other reason... I mention the latter possibility because Registry keys are not on the list of things Epic cleans up).

alok

Administrator

Re: Pin to taskbar

Thanks - great work, very helpful!!  We're investigating!!

NotQuiteDead

Guest

Re: Pin to taskbar

Epic repeatedly pins itself to the Windows taskbar. Sometimes when the screen goes black from inactivity, sometimes after several windows have been opened, and mostly whenever it just feels like pinning itself to the taskbar. This is seriously annoying.

Windows 7 64 bit
AsRock Z68 Extreme 4 Gen 3
Intel i5 2550K - clock set at 4.0 Ghz - Speedstep off
16 Gb. Ram
GeForce GTX 460 V2

alok

Administrator

Re: Pin to taskbar

Sorry about that - it's an issue with the chromium installer. The problem is solved for new users. 

We're working on updating the installer for existing users, but it's challenging and may take a bit more time.     

What we'd recommend for now is uninstalling Epic, then re-installing a new Epic.  In the Epic menu at the bottom, there's an Uninstall option that will remove Epic in a snap, and then re-installing Epic takes just a minute.   

Let us know if that solves this issue for you - thanks!!

filofox

Guest

Re: Pin to taskbar

This was fixed for a while (I did the uninstall/reinstall thing and it was OK) but started happening again a few days ago. Any idea what might've changed?

alok

Administrator

Re: Pin to taskbar

Hi Filofox -- we did some things with the installer/updater which led to some issues. 

We just launched a new update last night which should have fixed that and also is a much cleaner uninstall (still not perfect to be fair, but much much cleaner with many registry entries removed). 

Please let us know if with the new update, there are no pinning or other issues. 

Thanks!

filofox

Guest

Re: Pin to taskbar

This problem went away when I reinstalled a while ago, but now it's back -- and it puts an icon on the desktop, too (Win 7, Epic version 34.0.1841.0 (251262)).

sai

Guest

Re: Pin to taskbar

Hi filofox,

It could be the same old one. Just uninstalling would not remove the old installer. You need to remove even the updater too.
For removing that you need to type %localappdata% and delete all files under Epic Privacy Browser, then install the new one.

Here is the blog about it http://blog.epicbrowser.com/?p=16

Thank You
Sai

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http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013 … ensorship/

alok

Administrator

Re: Pin to taskbar

@filofox did you follow the more complete uninstall instructions?  Did that solve the repinning issue?

strother.g

Guest

Re: Pin to taskbar

I get the Aw, Snap! page.  Everytime

strother.g

Guest

Re: Pin to taskbar

hello Epicbrowser.com, am always getting this error message AW Snap page. please how can this be stop

dorthypersud

Guest

Re: Pin to taskbar

Reinstall it some it happen....

mbd

Guest

Re: Pin to taskbar

still happening.

on a win7 machine

Mizqm

Guest

Re: Pin to taskbar

I though I was rid of this problem for good for over a year now. Just yesterday it restarted again. The icon on the desktop and pinned to the taskbar. We need a definitive solution.

alok_epicteam

Administrator

Re: Pin to taskbar

Sorry about that.  We also thought it had stopped & had solved the issue in our installer. 

Did you do a new install or is this an old install?  Approximately when did you do the installation?  Are you on Windows 10?  May be an issue with the update & Windows 10, but it's related to the installer so strange it should start now.   Please let us know any other details & we'll solve this again.

jpq21

Guest

Re: Pin to taskbar

This is happening to me as well. I did the installation probably around half a year ago. Windows 7.

alok_epicteam

Administrator

Re: Pin to taskbar

Thanks for the details!!  Please let us know everyone who's facing this.  We're working on a solution & please bear with it for a week or two.  Sorry for this cropping up again!