Firefox

Note: Try to keep this page up-to-date by updating the status of the extensions and patches.

Mozilla Firefox
Type	Free
Layout engine	Gecko
Website	https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

Firefox is a free and open source web browser developed and maintained by Mozilla. It is known for its high degree of customization through add-ons and its adherence to Web standards.

Official branches

Unfortunately, the v3.6.x series of Firefox is now unsupported. It will no longer receive security or stability updates. Please use Pale Moon for those olde-skool aesthetics.

Mozilla offers five officially compiled branches or channels of Firefox. These are Release, Beta, Dev Edition, Nightly, and ESR.

• The Release branch of Firefox is geared towards the the average home or office Web user. It receives a major update every four weeks if all goes according to plan, but security and stability patches are issued as needed in the meantime.

• The Beta branch of Firefox is geared towards home users who want to try new features a few weeks early while contributing to Firefox development. It is generally quite stable with most remaining bugs being specific to certain configurations or drivers. In the course of a typical six week beta run, there are between seven and thirteen builds released.

• The Developer Edition or alpha branch of Firefox is geared towards Web developers and includes extra development tools and a special theme. Some instability and bugs should be expected.

• The Nightly or pre-alpha branch is intended for testing and debugging purposes. It represents the bleeding edge of Firefox development, so the likelihood of encountering instability, security vulnerabilities, and major bugs is high. As the name implies, Nightly typically receives patches on a day-to-day basis and new features as soon as they become ready.

• The Extended support release or ESR branch of Firefox is geared towards large organizations who require long-term support for mass deployments, but it is can also be a good option for the home user. It remains static for approximately one year after a major release, receiving new code only in the form of security and stability patches.

Notable forks

Due to the free and open source nature of its code base, Firefox has given rise to several forks.

• Pale Moon is a fork of Firefox dedicated to providing the classic user interface layout of the v3.6.x series while maintaining support for old XUL addons. It uses a fork of the Gecko rendering engine called Goanna. For a complete list of the differences between Pale Moon and Firefox, see this page. Note: it's made by a furry who has a fursona named Moonchild. He has art and has written furry stories. His furry website is here.

• The Tor Browser Bundle is a package designed specifically to visit Onion sites and to browse the Internet through the Tor network.
  • Mullvad Browser is a fork of Tor developed by a VPN company, intended for use on the clearnet.

• LibreWolf Is a fork designed to increase protection against tracking and fingerprinting techniques, removing all telemetry, data collection and annoyances, as well as disabling anti-freedom features like DRM.

Add-Ons

Adblocking, privacy, and security

uBlock Origin

uBlock Origin is a lightweight and low-resource adblocker. Has many filter lists built in, with EasyList, Peter Lowe’s Ad server list, EasyPrivacy, and Malware domains enabled by default.

• Can fully replace NoScript in advanced mode and outperform it, whilst offering more features.
• Able to replace ClearURLs by adding LegitmateURLShortner list.
• Not to be confused with 'uBlock', an EXTREMELY outdated fork with some very slight changes to the UI.
• If you feel bad about blocking advertisements, make a deal with yourself: you'll stop blocking ads when major international internet companies stop serving malware.
• Supports the WebExtensions API.

LocalCDN

LocalCDN is an updated fork of Decentraleyes, emulates remote frameworks (e.g. jQuery, Bootstrap, AngularJS) and delivers them as local resource. Prevents unnecessary 3rd party requests to Google, StackPath, MaxCDN and more.

ClearURLs

ClearURLs is a extension that automatically removes useless tracking elements from URLs

Multi Account Containers

Multi Account Containers is an extension by Mozilla that lets you filter your browser's cookies into "groups".

Customisation

Stylus

Stylus lets you customise websites by setting custom CSS for them. It is a replacement for the previously recommended add-on Stylish, which was brought out by a company and is now spyware that steals browsing history and more.

Tree Style Tabs

Tree Style Tabs shows tabs like a tree.

OneLiner

OneLiner is custom CSS that puts all the different bars at the top of the page, into a single bar (URLs, tabs, etc all on the same line).

Usability

WxIF

WxIF is a WebExt port of the legacy add-on FxIF. A tool to view EXIF data in image properties.

Violentmonkey

Violentmonkey allows you to install and manage custom userscripts.

Redirector

Redirector automatically redirects to user-defined URLs on a per-hyperlink basis.

Vimium-FF

Vimium-FF offers vim bindings via WebExt. However all WebExt extensions offering vim bindings are limited and will not work as well as they should (you will still need the mouse), due to how WebExt/nu-firefox works.

Other Vim Binding Options

There is a list on the vim Wiki that goes over all the vim extensions/add-ons.

Ricing

You can edit Firefox's appearance with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). To be more general, you can alter ANY web page with CSS. This is achieved with the usage of userstyles. To use and take complete advantage of them, you need a userstyle manager. A repository of userstyles can be found at userstyles.world.

Config

Below are options in about:config worth considering. Instead of doing this manually, consider visiting ffprofile to do this much easier and install extensions as well.

• dom.storage.enabled FALSE - Disable "client-side session and persistent storage" cookies (bad for 8ch - the replies hyperlinks next to the post number disappears).
• geo.enabled FALSE - Disable location data.
• general.useragent.override - Create as a String value and insert your own useragent.
  • Dynamically updated list of common user agents.
• network.dns.disablePrefetch TRUE - Stop Firefox looking up IP addresses of links of the page you haven't/aren't going to.
• network.http.pipelining TRUE - Possible speedup for some servers (send multiple files through one connection).
• network.http.pipelining.max-optimistic-requests 8 - Total number of pipelines.
• network.http.pipelining.ssl TRUE - Pipeline with HTTPS sites.
• network.http.proxy.pipelining TRUE - Pipleline through proxy connections.
• network.http.sendRefererHeader - 0 = never (bad for 8ch), 1 = domain only, 2 = full url (default).
• network.prefetch-next FALSE - Don't download pages linked to the current page unless we click the link.
• dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled FALSE - Don't allow webpages to mess with the clipboard.
• dom.disable_window_move_resize TRUE - Don't allow webpages to move or resize the browser window.
• dom.ipc.plugins.flash.subprocess.crashreporter.enabled FALSE - Don't report flash plugin crashes.
• media.autoplay.enabled FALSE - Don't autoplay media.
• media.peerconnection.enabled FALSE - Important for VPN users. Don't allow p2p downloading of media.
• pdfjs.disabled TRUE - Don't run javascript within the builtin PDF viewer.
• reader.parse-on-load.enabled FALSE - disable "reader view".
• browser.pocket.enabled (or extensions.pocket.enabled) FALSE - disable pocket.
• network.http.speculative-parallel-limit 0 - don't create connections to links you only hover over.
• dom.push.connection.enabled FALSE - Disable push notifications (FF44+).
• dom.push.enabled FALSE - (as above).
• dom.webnotifications.enabled FALSE - (as above).
• dom.webnotifications.serviceworker.enabled FALSE - (as above).
• loop.enabled FALSE - Disable loop/conversation calling features.
• browser.urlbar.unifiedcomplete FALSE - Disables the "Search With" popup when typing into the location bar.
• media.ffmpeg.enabled FALSE (linux only as of FF44) - Disable mp4 playback through ffmpeg, to stop ffmpeg bugs breaking your Firefox.
• media.eme.apiVisible FALSE - Stops pages from using a JavaScript library for DRM (Digital Rights Management/Digital Restrictions Management) in html video.

• media.eme.enabled FALSE - (as above).

For a privacy conscious user.js, create your own with ffprofile, or consider Arkenfox for one with even more emphasis on security (occasionally at the cost of functionality, like when you completely disable DOM storage, for instance), and less emphasis on blending in.

To compare a myriad of privacy-conscious user.js files, use jm42's compare-user.js