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Firefox

Configuration

about:config

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.

Bookmarks

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.

Dark Mode

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.

Tracking

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.

Updates

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

  • Set app.update.auto to FALSE.

Tips'n'Tricks

Address Bar

You can narrow your searches by starting them with:

^ History
* Bookmarks A star, like the bookmark icon
% Tabs
# Page titles Think of Markdown titles
@ URLs
+ Tags, separate with spaces for multiple Why isn't this # D:

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.

Bookmarks

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.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Address bar Ctrl+L
Bookmark Ctrl+D
Jump to right-most tab Alt+9
Move tabs Ctrl+Shift+PageUp|PageDown|Home|End

Keywords

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

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 8-)):

RSS

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.

Styling

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 :(

Method

  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.

Examples

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

See Also

Sundry

  • 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 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.

Troubleshooting

Browser works, pages don't load

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'

See Also

firefox.txt · Last modified: 2023/12/08 14:02 by rjt