Tomas Mozdren's website

my firefox setup

This page details my firefox setup for performance, privacy and security. If you use this and think it was of some use, please consider sharing a link to this page, thank you.

optimize performance

Open Firefox, and type “about:config” in the URL bar. Press Enter to navigate to the advanced configuration page. Click the I'll be careful, I promise button to proceed.

Make the following changes:

note: some of the settings you may or may not be able to change

Set browser.download.animateNotifications to false
Set security.dialog_enable_delay to 0
Set network.prefetch-next to false
Set browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.feeds.telemetry to false
Set browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.telemetry to false
Set browser.ping-centre.telemetry to false
Set toolkit.telemetry.archive.enabled to false
Set toolkit.telemetry.bhrPing.enabled to false
Set toolkit.telemetry.enabled to false
Set toolkit.telemetry.firstShutdownPing.enabled to false
Set toolkit.telemetry.hybridContent.enabled to false
Set toolkit.telemetry.newProfilePing.enabled to false
Set toolkit.telemetry.reportingpolicy.firstRun to false
Set toolkit.telemetry.shutdownPingSender.enabled to false
Set toolkit.telemetry.unified to false
Set toolkit.telemetry.updatePing.enabled to false

Restart Firefox

disable pocket

Open about:config and search for extensions.pocket.enabled or copy paste the following url into your address bar: about:config?filter=extensions.pocket.enabled
Double click to toggle to false
Restart Firefox

disable firefox sync

I should note that before you do this step make sure to request the removal of your firefox/mozilla account along with its data and sing out of the account on all devices. So just letting you know.

Open about:config and search for identity.fxaccounts.enabled or copy paste the following url into your address bar: about:config?filter=identity.fxaccounts.enabled
Double click to toggle to false
Restart Firefox

extend url bar

Rightclick the toolbar (where the url bar is, the blank space) as illustrated below

And then just drag the Flexible Space out of there, it is on both sides of the url bar

remove rounded corners

There is this repository made by leadweedy so make sure to follow the steps there.

So show him some love.

sync???

So now you may be wondering how we can get our bookmarks synced between devices since we do not want to use a mozilla account. Pretty simple really.

We will use a extension called xbrowsersync on all our devices where we want our bookmarks synced.

I will most likely end up hosting my own instance of this at some point.

extensions

Well let us continue with the extentions I use for better feel, speed, privacy, security and quality of life improvements.

Dark Reader - https://darkreader.org/ or Firefox Browser Add-Ons
uBlock Origin - https://ublockorigin.com/ or Firefox Browser Add-Ons
Auto Tab Discard - https://webextension.org/listing/tab-discard.html or Firefox Browser Add-Ons
Disable JavaScript - https://github.com/dpacassi/disable-javascript or Firefox Browser Add-Ons
Canvas Blocker - https://github.com/kkapsner/CanvasBlocker/ or Firefox Browser Add-Ons
xBrowserSync - https://www.xbrowsersync.org/ or Firefox Browser Add-Ons
I still don't care about cookies - https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Still-Dont-Care-About-Cookies or Firefox Browser Add-Ons
Classic mode for Wikipedia - https://jeanbaptisteb.github.io/classic_wikipedia/ or Firefox Browser Add-Ons
Load Reddit Images Directly - https://github.com/nopperl/load-reddit-images-directly or Firefox Browser Add-Ons
Startpage - https://add.startpage.com/?source=homepage
Return YouTube Dislike - https://returnyoutubedislike.com/ or Firefox Browser Add-Ons
Youtube-shorts block - https://github.com/doma-itachi/Youtube-shorts-block or Firefox Browser Add-Ons
User-Agent Switcher - https://gitlab.com/ntninja/user-agent-switcher or Firefox Browser Add-Ons

A quick note about User-Agent Switcher. On desktop I have set it to "Windows/Chrome 119" (at the time of writing it is the latest) and "Android Phone/Chrome 119".

what about mobile???

So what about mobile, well there is a pretty nice set of apps I use, I will list the major ones.

It should be noted that links titled as F-Droid can be used by Droid-ify app as Droid-ify is a F-Droid client.

App Store - Droid-ify - https://github.com/Droid-ify/client or F-Droid
Browser Updater - FFUpdater - https://github.com/Tobi823/ffupdater or F-Droid
Web browser - Iceraven Browser - https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser
xBrowserSync - https://www.xbrowsersync.org/ or Firefox Browser Add-Ons

To add some information, Iceraven is a Firefox based browser for android that I installed using FFUpdater. Next up my multiple app stores, Aurora Store is a Google Play store frontend and Droid-ify is a modernized F-Droid frontend.

In Iceraven I use the extentions like uBlock Origin, Dark Reader, I don't care about cookies, CanvasBlocker, Return Youtube Dislike, Youtube-shorts block and User-Agent Switcher.

To access the front end of all the addons, just return to the main browsing window and there in in the bottom right corner or top right corner (depends on the location of your browser bar) should be a "tripple-dot" menu then click addons and then click on any addon you want to modify, the addons frontend should open.

In Iceraven I have also set my default search engine to Startpage.

xBrowserSync was mentioned a couple times already, but it is used to access my bookmarks across devices.