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Firefox

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Firefox running on Phosh with mobile-config-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.

Installation

Depending on the user interface you have installed, Firefox is already part of your postmarketOS installation (e.g. in Phosh and Sxmo). For others, install the following two packages:

$ doas apk add mobile-config-firefox firefox-esr

Instead of firefox-esr, you can also install firefox to get the slightly newer version (but be aware that sometimes it includes changes that break the mobile configuration, and we need a bit to catch up with it. Help with that is of course always appreciated).

Alternatives

The upstream Firefox packages does not disable most telemetry and similar tracking shipped by upstream. Consider using librewolf, a privacy-centric fork which disables Mozilla's first-party spyware and analytics:

apk add librewolf

The mobile-config-firefox customisations might work with Librewolf, but the mobile-config-firefox-librewolf might be necessary instead.

These config packages are important to fix usability issues like screen width being wrong.

Tips and Tricks

Scale and keyboard on wayland desktop environments

Some desktop environments do not set the env variable MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND. As a workaround, you can replace the default Firefox launcher with a custom one.

These commands will create firefox wrapper, which will run firefox with wayland and firefox launcher (icon in menu)

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin/
echo '#!/bin/bash'\n'MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 firefox-esr $@' > ~/.local/bin/firefox-esr-wl
chmod +x ~/.local/bin/firefox-esr-wl
mkdir -p ~/.local/share/applications/
cp /usr/share/applications/firefox-esr.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/
sed -i 's/Exec=firefox-esr/Exec=firefox-esr-wl/g' ~/.local/share/applications/firefox-esr.desktop

Run it, then relogin

Tweaks

Disable Sponsored Sites

We don't want this since the wrong amazon is burning!

about:config

browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsored

set all to false.

Video Pop Out

You can actually disable the annoying video pop-out in about:config set:

media.videocontrols.picture-in-picture.enabled

to false.

Ai features

Disable Ai features, go to about:config and set

browser.ml.chat.enabled

to false.

Disable Tab Preview

go to

about:config

and set both

browser.tabs.hoverPreview

to false.

Hide https in url bar

go to

about:config

and set

browser.urlbar.trimHttps

to true.

Disable warning when closing tabs

micro ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default-release/user.js

set it to

user_pref("browser.tabs.warnOnClose", false); // Confirm before closing multiple tabs

Remove Items from URL Bar

Long click onto the item and select remove.

To get rid of the bookmarks star, edit */chrome/userChrome.css and add:

 #page-action-buttons{
 display:none;
} 

Remove Items from Menu

Remove the 'Report broken Site' entry with adding to .mozilla/firefox/*.default-release/chrome/userChrome.css

#menu_report_broken {
    display: none !important;
}

Force Website Mobile

Some websites do not show in mobile version and are then hard to read. Press:

 ctrl + shift + m 

and select iphoneSE layout on top left.

another trick is to scale the page with:

Ctrl -
Ctrl +

PGP

Pretty Good Privacy

Since we are using desktop firefox, it is possible to use mailvelope.com to encrypt/decrypt emails in roundcube mail, which is amazing! Just follow the official setup procedure. You might have to scale your display to factor 2 to get all buttons.

Profiles

You messed with Firefox and now you get a warning on launch:

Can not load profile..

just start it with:

firefox-esr -p

and create a new profile.

Policies & Search Engine

Policies

By default, mobile-config-firefox adds a policies entry to get rid of invasive stuff. While this is a great idea it my cause some trouble for users living in non-free countries where searching the net is controlled.

To enable google search engine, you can edit:

./etc/firefox/policies/policies.json

See the original file here.

Be aware that, in a free country, it makes sense to avoid google.com as search engine!

Block Search Results

To get rid of reddit, pinterest, youtube, amazon etc. in your search results generate your own filterlist or use my list and copy it to your ublock MyFilter list.

Set Custom Search Engine

Use 4get and define your prefered scraper:

1. in about:config

look for

browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh

and hit the + so it says true

2. go to settings and under search engine you find a new add button, click it and enter: https://4get.bloat.cat/web?s=%s&scraper=qwant&nsfw=yes there are also other instances: https://4get.dorfdsl.de/web?s=%s

there are also SearxNG, Whoogle.

Voilà, you set yourself a great private and advertisement free search engine!

fuck surveilance capitalism:

"I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, because your judgement and intentions are!"

Webapps

(can we remove this?)

Warning WARNING: This no longer works on recent versions of postmarketOS (including stable releases) 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 shortcuts 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.

Hardware 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.

Hide tabs toolbar and navbar

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.

See also