Setting Up Firefox

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Table of Contents

Google is killing Manifest v2 in an attempt to kill ad blockers. This change will affect not only Chrome, but browsers based on Chromium such as Edge. It’s a good time to switch to Firefox. Everything just works; I’ve faced zero breakage on any site, even with some additional privacy protection settings turned on.

Most Firefox guides out there recommend using hardened configs or forks. The only thing they harden is your life. I want to get shit done, not fumble around with my settings trying to unbreak a site every 30 seconds. My configuration is the middle ground, where your browser protects your privacy and your sanity.

Settings

General

Home

Privacy and Security

Extensions

uBlock Origin is the best ad blocker. I enable additional filter lists: everything under “Cookie notices” and everything under “Annoyances”. I also add the I don’t care about cookies filter list (no need to install the extension).

Dark Reader adds a dark mode to every website. After installing it, open the extension menu, go to “Dev Tools”, “Advanced”, and click “Preview new design”.

Bypass Paywalls Clean lets you bypass most of the popular paywalled sites and sites that need you to login after viewing a page or two (like Quora). After installing it, go to the extension options and enable “Check for update rules at startup”. Then go to “Opt-in” and enable everything.

Violentmonkey is a userscript manager, which I use to install the following userscripts. Bypass All Shortlinks Debloated automatically skips a lot of link shorteners that make you wait or require CAPTCHAs.

No Google Search Translation disables the annoying Google feature that translates all search results.

Most Recent Tab adds a shortcut to switch to the, well, most recent tab. After installing, you can go to Manage Extensions, click the settings icon, go to Manage Extension Shortcuts, and set the shortcut to what you want. I have mine set to Ctrl + Q.

Enforce Browser Fonts lets you disable web fonts and use the browser configured fonts (related blog post). You can change the default mode to whitelist or blacklist in the Manage Extension page.

Imagus Mod is a continuation of the Imagus mod. It enlarges media on hover. After installing it, go to the extension’s settings, sieve tab, click the remove all button, click the update sieve button, then save. I also set it so that it only triggers if Ctrl is pressed.

Dictionary Anywhere shows you the definition when you double-click a word.

about:config

Setting accessibility.force_disabled to 1 in helps with memory usage and performance.

To disable fullscreen fade animations, set full-screen-api.transition-duration.enter and full-screen-api.transition-duration.leave to 0 0.

To disable fullscreen warnings, set full-screen-api.warning.timeout to 0.

If you don’t use Pocket, you can disable it by setting extensions.pocket.enabled to false.

If you want to switch tabs by scrolling on the tab bar, set toolkit.tabbox.switchByScrolling to true.

If you want to reduce spacing in the UI, enable compact mode.

Sync about:config Tweaks

Firefox lets you sync custom preferences. Let’s take accessibility.force_disabled as an example. Prepend the preference with services.sync.prefs.sync. so that it becomes services.sync.prefs.sync.accessibility.force_disabled. Paste it in the search box, add it as a boolean, and set it to true.

Thoughts on Telemetry

I’ve left telemetry on, and you should consider the same for FOSS applications. This helps the developers improve their applications. Remember: telemetry is not inherently evil, privacy-invasive telemetry is. You can visit about:telemetry in Firefox to view all the telemetry being sent.

Changelog

Note: Changes made before 25 Sep 24 are not covered.

Footnotes

  1. I use this to open M3U files in MPV directly, for my streaming setup. ↩

  2. I use Quad9 (https://dns.quad9.net/dns-query) as my DNS provider. ↩