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Firefox Tweaks – An attempt to make Firefox suck less

• overgard 11y ago
  Ugh, it has "disable webgl" because it's a "debatable" security concern? And disable ipv6? I hope people know what these settings are for before they apply these.
  • Navarr 11y ago
    Retitle "Project to make Firefox suck more"
    • vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      No, this is definitely suckless: http://suckless.org/philosophy http://suckless.org/philosophy
  • engi_nerd 11y ago
    pdf.js is disabled, too, so no more easy opening PDFs in the browser if you apply these tweaks.
  • time4hn 11y ago
    The type of person who is adding these settings probably wants this. That is, a web browser that does one thing very well: browse the web. The title of the repo is kind of misleading in that regard, since it makes it sound like something the average user might like.
• mediumdeviation 11y ago
  > Remove "(site) is now fullscreen" nag message and make it faster For a list that want to make the browser more secure, why do they want to remove the only line of defense against sites using fullscreen mode for phishing? > Disable PDF reader PDF.js has fewer security vulnerabilities than desktop PDF readers. > Disable 'safe browsing' aka. Google tracking/logging This seems like a really bad idea for most users
  • bpicolo 11y ago
    The only time I ever see the fullscreen message is when the screen has essentially already fullscreened itself in a case where I want it to. =/
    • rcthompson 11y ago
      Then you probably haven't visited a phishing site that uses this technique.
    • nfm 11y ago
      The warning is a bit annoying, but without it attacks like this would be harder to spot: http://feross.org/html5-fullscreen-api-attack/ http://feross.org/html5-fullscreen-api-attack/ (it's just a proof-of-concept, no malicious payload)
      • thaumasiotes 11y ago
        Who are all these people who apparently run their browser maximized? Web pages generally get worse as the window gets wider. (Unless, of course, they control their own width, but that's its own obvious prompt to stop wasting all your screen space.)
        • J_Darnley 11y ago
          Only with a rubbish, widescreen display are modern websites crap. Get a nice 4:3 or 5:4 display and everything looks good when maximised.
          • thaumasiotes 11y ago
            No, it would still have to be a small squarish display. Fixing the aspect ratio won't fix the problem that you have way more space than the website will take.
      • bpicolo 11y ago
        That seems like an entirely inadequate warning for an average user to spot phishing anyway.
• pbiggar 11y ago
  Not a great attempt IMO. The networking and UI things are a valiant effort. Mixing them with non-mainstream security concerns are a bad idea. You may feel that safe-browsing is tracking by the man, but advising newbies to turn it off is borderline irresponsible. Similar argument for ipv6 (wtf), error reporting (congrats: your bugs will never be fixed cause firefox doesn't know about them), and geolocation ("why doesn't google maps ever know where I am?"). If you apply these, some caveat emptor: when firefox upgrades it usually wont change these settings for you. So if firefox makes things awesome, you'll be left behind. You may want that, you may not. Personally, I'd advise against.
  • pbiggar 11y ago
    Made a PR: https://github.com/dfkt/firefox-tweaks/pull/1 https://github.com/dfkt/firefox-tweaks/pull/1
    • gry 11y ago
      A critique and a follow-up. Better than almost everyone.
  • logn 11y ago
    > caveat emptor: when firefox upgrades it usually wont change these settings for you It's not so bad. You can sort prefs by user-defined, they're in bold, and each one has a reset-to-default option. Also you can do a whole browser reset which preserves only passwords/bookmarks. Instructions: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-add-ons-and-settings https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a... And firefox profiles might be handy for this too (from the command line add --ProfileManager or -P <profile name>).
    • gry 11y ago
      Yes it is. Everything you've described of my two brothers can't do.
      • technomancy 11y ago
• forgotmypassw 11y ago
  The tweaks under appearance and bloatware are good, although I'd probably leave error reporting on (I'm on the nightly channel for a reason), as well as WebGL although it would be nice if it could be changed to "click-to-run" style launching. The rest of the tweaks seems fairly reasonable privacy-wise.
• A010 11y ago
  Why Reading mode is even considered "bloatware"?
  • adrusi 11y ago
    Well it was added recently, during the same time as things like pocket and hello are being added. A lot of people will never use it, so it's fair for them to put it in the same bloatware category. I use it a lot on mobile, not so much on desktop. I didn't want to disable it. I'm not the biggest fan of hello in firefox, but I've gotten some light mileage out of it, so I guess I can't be too upset. Pocket though just really shouldn't be in the browser.
    • mintplant 11y ago
      Reader mode was added in 2012-2013. Pocket and Hello were introduced in 2015.
      • agumonkey 11y ago
        Really ? Did they just add the url icon then ? I never noticed any of it before this year.
        • agapos 11y ago
          Reader mode was present in the Mobile version for a long time, it's port to the desktop Firefox happened recently AFAIK.
          • agumonkey 11y ago
            Aight. Better late than never IMO.
  • soapdog 11y ago
    Reading mode is one of my favorite things about firefox. Specially on mobile. I think its a great feature.
• codemac 11y ago
  Disabling IPv6?! This is an... opinionated list. Wish there was more annotation around what those opinions were.
  • Proleps 11y ago
    Don't know if it is still true. DNS lookup didn't work correctly when ipv6 was enabled.
    • TD-Linux 11y ago
      W..what? I don't think this has been true for any Firefox version, ever. Certainly I'm using v6 right now. (Not on hn of course, it's v4 only)
      • r3bl 11y ago
        It was true for a Linux + Firefox combination a few versions ago. I had that issue. Basically, the DNS lookup lasted like 4-5 times longer than it did while opening the same site in Chrome.
      • vetinari 11y ago
        It used to be issue - in your local network, you had IPv6 automatically with Vista and newer (the same for Linux distributions). So your browser resolved AAAA records, trued o open connection to the the host, after few seconds found out that it is going nowhere, resolved the A records, the site worked. So it became popular to manually disable IPv6 to speed up the browsing.
• scurvy 11y ago
  Why are you disabling IPv6?! It's faster than IPv4.
  • warkdarrior 11y ago
    Yep, 50% faster.
• swrobel 11y ago
  Any feedback on which of these apply to Firefox mobile?
• mintplant 11y ago
  BLOATWARE Disable 'Reader Mode': Why? I use this every day to pull the text out of frustratingly-formatted sites.
  • nmridul 11y ago
    One of the features I regularly use. Makes it easy to read and instantly removes most of the irritating .js stuffs that many sites add.
  • ww520 11y ago
    Yeah, I like Reader Mode. It strips off all the fluff to make pages readable again.
  • bhrgunatha 11y ago
    It's the only UI change to firefox that I've come to appreciate. I can't think of a single UI change since the introduction of Australis that hasn't caused me pain, frustration and forced me to spend considerable time and effort to look for workarounds or fixes. Since almost all of my UI interaction is muscle memory - changing, removing things and adding completely unwanted elements has been an unpleasant and grating experience for me and I come to dread every new feature introduced to firefox. Reader is the only positive one for me. My eyesight isn't the best and the modern design trend for low contrast and small text makes many sites unreadable. Reader fixes that for me ina simple way, it's straightforward and doesn't have any unnecessary features.
  • r3bl 11y ago
    My guess is because of the Pocket integration.
    • mintplant 11y ago
      Reader mode is a separate feature from the Pocket button.
• Animats 11y ago
  Nice. That's a useful guide for writing an add-on to manage all those settings, some of which are documented only in very obscure places. Whether or not you turn them on or off is your business, but they need a user interface.
  • technomancy 11y ago
    TBH I don't care if there's a user interface; what I want is to be able to store my browser's config in git along with the rest of my config. Every other program I use regularly is configured through sane dotfiles; if I check them out on a fresh OS install it's all like I want, except Firefox. I have to go through this insane song and dance of hunting down all my extensions and remembering obscure about:config settings every time. In fact, it's a bit cringeworthy that this whole list is presented as a thing you're supposed to manually enter while using the about:config search.
    • PhantomGremlin 11y ago
      a thing you're supposed to manually enter Doesn't everybody know about user.js? Keep that updated and store that in git. If that file is present in the .../Profiles/<whatever>.default then Firefox automatically uses it. And Firefox doesn't rewrite it, as opposed to prefs.js. It's still a hassle, but it's far easier than manually entering things into about:config. Here are a few of the things currently in my user.js: user_pref("accessibility.blockautorefresh", true); user_pref("browser.preferences.inContent", false); user_pref("network.dns.disablePrefetch", true); user_pref("network.prefetch-next", false); user_pref("pdfjs.disabled", true); user_pref("plugins.hide_infobar_for_blocked_plugin", true); user_pref("plugins.notifyMissingFlash", false); user_pref("social.enabled", false); user_pref("social.remote-install.enabled", false); I've got more in there but I'm too lazy to look all of them up to make sure they still apply to the current version of Firefox. The ones I pasted seemed relevant based on their name.
      • Animats 11y ago
        When you have to do something like that to disable unwanted intrusive and commercial features in Firefox, you know that the Mozilla Foundation is not your friend.
• zobzu 11y ago
  Even thus the changes arent all great many of them are definitely in the "why isnt this default?" category for me. For ex webrtc should def. prompt instead of leaking by default, full screen animation is slow as fuck, pocket is adware, loop and safe-browsing should be turnable-off in the main prefs, social is adware, yada yada.
• gurraman 11y ago
  browser.urlbar.trimURLs - false Yay! This feature has annoyed me to no end.
• Radle 11y ago
  Is there any good reason to disable IPv6? I can't take the list seriously, without a proper explanation.
• adsche 11y ago
  I agree that these are probably not good default settings, but just now I learned about pocket, hello, social, ... Why are these not plugins in the first place, or manageable through the preferences dialog?
• santoshalper 11y ago
  There is a massive bias for change aversion in this list. Basically anything that Firefox has added in the last couple of years he doesn't like. Not advised.
• tdkl 11y ago
  Disregarding the majority of rants here, I think it's a great list for everyone to just cherry-pick from for their own needs. It ain't all or nothing.
  • JoshMnem 11y ago
    Yes... it inspired me to make my own version that only has what I need: https://github.com/j127/Better-Firefox https://github.com/j127/Better-Firefox
• known 11y ago
  Depends on your RAM and CPU.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• ConceptJunkie 11y ago
  Step 1: Install Pale Moon. Step 2: Enjoy.