Firefox

postmarketOS ships the desktop version of Firefox as default in Phosh and Plasma Mobile, the mobile and privacy friendly configuration from mobile-config-firefox. To remove this configuration, uninstall the mobile-config-firefox
package.
Webapps
Warning: This no longer works on the recent versions of postmarketOS (including stable release) because Firefox has removed support for the site specific browser mode. You can, though, replace --ssb with --kiosk to achieve a similar result in certain sites. (--kiosk opens websites in kiosk-mode which is the same of a normal browsing session but without the browser UI (Menus,Url-bar,toolbar etc. etc). Some sites do not react well, and it is suggested to memorise the keyboard short-cuts of Firefox, especially the one for closing the active tab and for going backward/forward )
To create webapps for use with Firefox, the following shell script can be used. It generates a separate Firefox profile for isolation, and adds a desktop entry that opens the corresponding site as a single-site browser (without a url-bar).
#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Create firefox profile
set -e
name=$1
url=$2
# Ugly, copy-pasted from SO
simple_name=$(echo "$name" | awk '{print tolower($0)}' | sed 's/ //g')
echo "Creating webapp $name, using $url."
firefox -CreateProfile $simple_name
profile_dir=$(find ~/.mozilla/firefox/ -maxdepth 1 | grep $simple_name)
echo 'user_pref("browser.ssb.enabled",true);' > $profile_dir/user.js
# Create desktop entry
cat >~/.local/share/applications/$simple_name.desktop <<EOL
[Desktop Entry]
Exec=firefox -P $simple_name --ssb $url
Icon=/home/user/.local/share/applications/$simple_name.png
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Name=$name
StartupNotify=true
StartupWMClass=firefox
EOL
# Get icon
wget $url/favicon.ico -O /tmp/favicon.ico
convert /tmp/favicon.ico /tmp/favicon.png
mv /tmp/favicon.png .local/share/applications/$simple_name.png ||
mv /tmp/favicon-0.png .local/share/applications/$simple_name.png
rm /tmp/favicon*.png
Save this script as /add-webapp.sh
, and mark it as executable.
Running the command ./add-webapp.sh "Hacker News" "https://news.ycombinator.com"
will create a launcher shortcut to Hacker News.
Harware accelerated rendering
To make firefox on pinephone/pinetab/pb/pbp smoother you need to change layers.acceleration.force-enabled
to true in about:config
.
To ensure that it kicked in check about:support
, graphics->compositing should become OpenGL.
From Firefox 93, the legacy hardware acceleration layers have been disabled and only webrender is allowed. Webrender requires gles 3 to be able to use hardware acceleration, otherwise it will use "software webrenderer". Since Pinephone does not support gles3, from Firefox 93, the browser experience has become much worse because everything is software rendered. Fortunately firefox-esr (available from repositories and on par with security updates as the latest version) is still at v 91.6, so it is still possible to use legacy hardware acceleration layers. They are not enabled by default, to do it there is need to change two parameters in about:config
, that are layers.acceleration.force-enable
to true and gfx.webrender.force-disabled
to true.
Open firefox, search and install Panorama View addons (or whatever tabs view addons). Enter URL about:support
, choose Open Directory at Profile Directory. Edit chrome/userChrome.css(if it doesn't exist, you can create one)
Tabs Toolbar and navbar on top screen:
/* Hide tabs toolbar on top*/
#TabsToolbar {
visibility: collapse !important;
}
/* Hide navbar on top*/
#nav-bar {
/* customize this value. */
--navbar-margin: -30px;
margin-top: var(--navbar-margin);
margin-bottom: 0;
z-index: -100;
transition: all 0.3s ease !important;
opacity: 0;
}
#navigator-toolbox:focus-within > #nav-bar,
#navigator-toolbox:hover > #nav-bar
{
margin-top: 0;
margin-bottom: var(--navbar-margin);
z-index: 100;
opacity: 1;
}
Tabs Toolbar and navbar on bottom screen:
/* Hide tabs toolbar on bottom*/
#TabsToolbar {
visibility: collapse !important;
}
/* Hide navbar on bottom*/
#nav-bar {
/* customize this value. */
--navbar-margin: -30px;
margin-top: 0;
margin-bottom: var(--navbar-margin);
z-index: -100;
transition: all 0.3s ease !important;
opacity: 0;
}
#navigator-toolbox:focus-within > #nav-bar,
#navigator-toolbox:hover > #nav-bar
{
margin-top: var(--navbar-margin);
margin-bottom: 0;
z-index: 100;
opacity: 1;
}
Customize Toolbar to edit Panorama View first icon showing on navigation bar. Changing Phosh scale_screen to 1.75 and Firefox zoom to 150% to fix some glitches for small panel/display in Settings
See also
- aports#11141 Firefox was broken in Alpine on armv7
- pmaports!1445: configure firefox-esr for mobile and privacy (has more screenshots)
- pmaports!1492: new Firefox mobile config, that works with >= 78 too
- Firefox Add-ons