Yeah, it is. Firebase is kind of interesting; when you hook up a watcher to it (ala [the docs](https://www.firebase.com/docs/reading-data.html), it immediately pulls down the data. So simply instantiating the model of collection will pull the data down. Took me a little playing around to figure that out. Also, the docs on the backfire library are kind of wrong :\. 

But ultimately, this change should be backed out.