💾 Archived View for snowcode.ovh › tech › firefox.gmi captured on 2022-04-29 at 11:30:11. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

My Firefox configuration

I've recently installed the latest version of Firefox, and I'm gonna play the advocate of the devil: I actually like the design.

Step 1: Installing Firefox

First, let's download it from the official web page

Firefox download page

Then, let's extract this tarball into /usr/local

$ sudo mv ~/Downloads/firefox*.tar.bz2 /usr/local
$ cd /usr/local
$ sudo tar xvf firefox*.tar.bz2
$ sudo rm firefox*.tar.bz2

Finally, link the "firefox" binary to your binary folder.

$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/firefox/firefox /usr/bin

And now you can open Firefox and start configuring it

$ firefox

Step 2: Changing preferences

First, let's go on the preferences page: about:preferences

Those are my settings:

Firefox home content : web search only
Default search engine : DuckDuckGo
Enhanced tracking protection : Strict
Do not track : always
Ask to save logins and passwords for website : false
Allow firefox to ... : false
Block dangerous or deceptive content : false
Enable HTTPS-Only mode in all windows : true

Step 3: Installing add-ons

Now, let's install some add-ons. I only have two of them. One for uBlock Origin, which is an absolute must-have to me. And one called Violent Monkey for user scripts (my password generator/manager is a userscript).

uBlock Origin

Violentmonkey

My user script for passwords

All those things are open-source.

Step 4: Changing the toolbar

First, I want to unlock a style of toolbar that is now disabled by default. So go into about:config.

Click on "Accept the risk and continue". Then search for "compact", set the first result to "true".

Once you did that, right click anywhere in an empty space of the toolbar and click on "Customize". Here I simply changed the theme to dark, the desity to compact and I removed all the useless things from the toolbar (like empty spaces, pocket, firefox account, etc).

Conclusion

And here you are, that is my privacy and security focused config of Firefox 89. It's nothing fancy but it works well and the design is pretty good.