I hope bell had the best intentions when doing this but even that is scary that they failed to understand the Internet and how it works.

The reason I would consider the Bell hijack a net-neutrality issue and not the browsers is because bell is affecting the network and my browsers are not. Bell was also going against a network standard that applications relied on to provide useful features to users.

I would love to here more about this new solution when it is deployed by Bell.

Cheers

Keep in mind that Bell had best intentions in mind, by implementing a search page (similar to the google search you mention). Remember that not everyone uses Firefox and the “awesome bar”.

I disagree with your comment on how this goes against net-neutrality, since IE and Firefox have been “hijacking” your incorrectly typed URLs in the address bar for years now. Though, I will agree that the correct opt-out solution should have been available when the feature first launched to leave you still with a choice.

Disclaimer: I work on the project that will be implementing the opt-out solution.

Haven’t tested this yet. Hope it works.

But I was with Rogers last summer when they started DNS hijacking (one of the last straws…). The only problem with the Firefox NoRedirect solution is that it doesn’t actually fix the broken DNS for your internet connection, only for Firefox. OpenDNS sucks with the default configuration, but with enough fiddling around (basically, disabling all the “features”), you can turn off their DNS redirects too.

I switched our router to use OpenDNS, but eventually Rogers caved a little bit and offered an alternate DNS server that performs to spec. I ended up just switching to that. Maybe Bell will do something similar? (I wouldn’t hold your breath…)

Thanks, this is an invasion of our privacy. Its akin to having any requests to a gaming site redirected to HP Games, or equivalent. Completely wrong.