Mobile and privacy friendly configuration for current standard and extended support releases of Firefox.
This does not replace a proper implementation in Firefox upstream (interesting stuff happens in issues linked in "References").
- Adapt UI elements and "about:" pages to small screen sizes (when opened on small screen)
- Enable mobile gestures
- Privacy tweaks:
- Disable search suggestions
- Disable Firefox studies
- Disable Telemetry
- Set DuckDuckGo as default search engine, remove other search engines except for Wikipedia (only works in Firefox ESR, limitation of policies.json)
- Install uBlock origin by default (why?)
- Uncluttering:
- Disable built-in advertisements (e.g. hardcoded links for certain social media sites on the start page)
- Disable "User Messaging" about new features etc.
There's a
screenshot thread
of the 3.0.0_rc1
release.
As user, it is possible to override all options set by this project. Usually it can be done in the preferences (which are now adaptive, so you can actually use them on your phone).
If it cannot be changed in preferences, look in
/etc/firefox/policies/policies.json
. You can see the active policies while
Firefox is running in about:policies
. The uBlock origin add-on for example,
is getting installed through policies.json
and can be removed in that file
if you do not want it. Without editing the file, it can only be disabled in the
add-on settings, and not removed, this is a limitation of policies.json
.
Feel free to create an issue if you run into problems. Or even better, attempt to fix the problem yourself (see development instructions below) and submit a merge request.
Firefox' developer tools include a
remote debugger,
which even has the "pick an element" feature. You will be able to click that
button on your PC, then tap on an element of the Firefox UI on your phone, and
then you will see the HTML code and CSS properties on your PC just as if it was
a website. So this is highly recommended when contributing changes to
userChrome.css
.
- Connect your phone and your PC to the same network (Wi-Fi or USB network)
- On your phone, open Firefox and
about:config
:- Change
devtools.chrome.enabled
totrue
- Change
devtools.debugger.remote-enabled
totrue
- The debugger will only listen on localhost by default. If you know what you
are doing, you may set
devtools.debugger.force-local
tofalse
, so it listens on all interfaces. Otherwise you'll need something like an SSH tunnel. - Close firefox
- Change
- Connect to your phone via SSH
- Set up environment variables properly, so you can start programs (one lazy
way to do it, is
tmux
on your phone in the terminal, thentmux a
in SSH) - Run
firefox --start-debugger-server 6000
(or another port if you desire)
- Set up environment variables properly, so you can start programs (one lazy
way to do it, is
- Run Firefox on your PC
- Go to
about:debugging
- Add your phone as "network location" (
172.16.42.1:6000
if connected through USB Network) - Press the connect button on the left
- If it does not work, check if a firewall on your phone is blocking the port (i.e. nftables in postmarketOS).
- Go to
- On your phone
- Confirm the connection on your phone's screen
- If the button is not visible on the screen, try switching to a terminal virtual keyboard, hit "tab" three times and then return
- Confirm the connection on your phone's screen
- On your PC
- Scroll down to Processes, Main Process, and click "Inspect"
- Now use the "Pick an element" button as described in the introduction. Find
the
userChrome.css
file in the "Style editor" tab and edit it as you like. - Consider copy pasting the contents to a text editor every now and then, so you don't lose it when closing Firefox by accident.
Note that after making changes to CSS files, and deploying them on your
system (make install
), you might need to restart firefox twice before
changes are applied.
The src/mobile-config-autoconfig.js
script generates userChrome.css
and
userContent.css
while Firefox starts. It logs to your Firefox profile
directory, follow the log file with:
$ tail -F $(find ~/.mozilla -name mobile-config-firefox.log)
- Don't make longer lines than 79 columns where possible (like in PEP-8)
- Use 4 spaces for indent in all files, except for shell scripts (use tabs
there). Consider configuring your editor to use
.editorconfig
, then it gets configured automatically. - Linter:
.ci/lint.sh
(consider setting it as pre-commit hook, requires GNU grep)
- How to use the Firefox Browser Toolbox
- firefox-csshacks
- FirefoxCSS subreddit
- whattrainisitnow.com: FF and FF ESR releases currently supported upstream, we try to support these with this config