Disabling Dropbox’s Haxie
Dropbox injects code into the Finder in order to draw the green and blue badges atop your icons. I prefer to run a clean system, and it turns out that you can prevent your Finder from being patched by running these two commands in Terminal:
sudo rm -rf /Library/DropboxHelperTools rm /Applications/Dropbox.app/Contents/Resources/DropboxHelperInstaller.tgz
I first heard about this last year, and indeed it does not seem to interfere with any non-cosmetic functionality. It was also recently recommended in the forum (via John Gruber). Since the haxie is not strictly necessary, I think Dropbox should provide an option in the user interface to turn it off.
Update (2011-04-01): You’ll have to do this each time Dropbox updates itself to a new version.
Update (2011-12-06): With the current version of Dropbox:
sudo rm -rf /Library/DropboxHelperTools rm /Applications/Dropbox.app/Contents/Resources/DropboxPlugin.plugin.tgz
Update (2012-02-10): With the current version of Dropbox:
sudo rm -rf /Library/DropboxHelperTools rm /Applications/Dropbox.app/Contents/Resources/DropboxBundle.bundle.tgz
Update (2012-08-16): With the current version of Dropbox:
sudo rm -rf /Library/DropboxHelperTools rm /Applications/Dropbox.app/Contents/Resources/DropboxHelperInstaller.tgz
