Firefox

Firefox is going to shit, it seems every new big update is some AI bullshit or sellign data to other companies… but I'm still using it…

Mozilla's introduced some new flavour of 'ethical' advertising that you have to opt-out of.

Settings → Privacy & Security → Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement

An obscured, but powerful, method of configuring Firefox. You can edit settings by entering about:config in the address bar. From there you can search for settings and edit them.

In the 'New Bookmark' and 'Edit This Bookmark' menus that appear when you click the bookmark icon, there's a list of the most recently used folders in the 'Folder' drop-down. You can increase this by searching for browser.bookmarks.editDialog.maxRecentFolders, and increasing or decreasing the number to suit.

To tell websites that you prefer to view pages in dark mode (or…)

• Set ui.systemUsesDarkTheme to:
  • 0 = light
  • 1 = dark
  • 2 = no preference

If you want your UI to be dark you need to use a theme.

Firefox's hid the option of add your own search engines for some reason, but you can add it back with:

• browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh

You've probably have to add it with the plus button, tell it to use booleanm and make sure it's then set to true. Then you can add things from the bottom of the Search preferences, and from the address bar when you're browsing.

Firefox has lots of telemetry settings, rather than try to list them all you should just put 'telemetry' into the search bar and go through and set everything you can to false.

Removes tracking extensions on URLs, except for google stuff :/

• Set privacy.query_stripping.enabled to TRUE.

Probably better alternative is to use a dedicated extension.

To disable automatic updates you now have to do it though about:config :/

• Set app.update.auto to FALSE.

You can narrow your searches by starting them with:

They're easy to forget, so I've added some Memory-aid notes. There's a little add-on you can use to remind yourself: location-bar-characters.

Also see the §Keywords section below.

If you want to import bookmarks I've made some notes on the syntax of the special HTML file: file_kinds§bookmarks.

Handy if you want to make the list by hand, or made a script to convert from different formats or whatever. Figuring this out so I can import bookmarks exported from Mastodon.

This same format also works in Chrome and other browsers.

If you add keywords to your bookmarks, you can also go straight to those pages by typing the keyword.

You can also use these for bang-like searches by bookmarking a site's search page/results and using %s to indicate where search terms go. A shortcut to creating these is to open the search page you want a keyword associated with, and right-click o nthe search box and add the keyword that way.

Reader View is a nice clean way to read stuff online. Makes a lot of news and writing sites actually tolerable. Strips out everything but the text and images. Especially great on mobile, as it will turn pages that aren't designed for a small screen into something comfortable to read in that format.

Some add-ons for enhancing reader view (that I'm yet to test ):

• Open in Reader View - right-click menu option.
• Automatic Reader View - Always open particular sites in reader view.
• Auto Reader View - 〃

Firefox has dropped support for RSS, it doesn't even render feeds anymore. You can re-add support with plugins, plus add some other useful features:

• I use feed-preview to get the old RSS functions back. It renders previews of feeds, and puts an icon in the address bar when feeds are present. There are other add-ons that do the same thing.
• I use youtube-rss-finder to make it easier to get feed links for Youtube. Like Feed Preview, it puts an icon in the address bar.

As an alternative to add-ons like Stylus, you can simply add CSS rules to the file userContent.css. It's slightly annoying in that you have to restart Firefox for it to reload the file, but you can use Stylus or the built-in developer tools (you can load files in the 'style editor' tab) to preview things. For styling Firefox itself you create a file called userChrome.css.

NB: Currently userChrome is working fine, but userContent is not doing anything for me :(

1. Open about:config and turn toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets to True.
2. Open your profile directory (for me it's ~/.mozilla/firefox/[profile name]) and create a directory called chrome if it doesn't exist.
3. Inside chrome create a file called userContent.css
4. Add rules to this, enclosed within @-moz-document domain([url]) {} that references the site you wish to target.
   • Instead of domain([url]) you can use url, regex, etc. See: @document#Syntax.
   • For userChrome.css you don't need the @-moz-document stuff, just add the rules like normal.

@-moz-document domain(duckduckgo.com) {
	.result[data-domain="www.w3schools.com"] {
		display:none;
	}
}

• https://www.userchrome.org/
• https://old.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS

• You can middle-click on the reload page button (↻) to duplicate the current tab. Way easier than having to right-click on the tab and select it from the menu.
• You can middle-click on the new tab button (+ button on the right end of the tab bar) to open a new tab with the contents of the primary buffer (last text selected) as the contents of the address bar. Typically it will search for whatever you paste, but if it's a URL it will go straight there.
• You can select multiple tabs with Ctrl and Shift clicking like you would in other programs.
• Quickest way to see alternate stylesheets is Alt+v then y.

Sometimes after a crash Firefox will start-up just fine, but pages won't load. Deleting ~/.cache/mozilla seems to fix it.

I ended up making an alias in my .bashrc:

alias fix-firefox='rm -rf ~/.cache/mozilla/firefox'

• mozilla/readability - Standalone version of the reader mode.