Farewell

This project began as an experiment to merge the Firefox GNOME theme into mobile-config-firefox and then improve usability and performance.

Over the past two years, nearly all “hard to upstream” patches have been adopted upstream, which significantly reduced the effort required to rebase onto newer versions of MCF. At the same time, interest in the GNOME theme and consequently the work of rebasing and resolving conflicts between the two projects has gradually declined. The remaining meaningful patches are now relatively easy to apply on top of MCF, so it feels like the right time to bring this project to a close.

A new fork, with the goal of rebasing every couple of months, is now available at: https://github.com/FuriLabs/mobile-config-firefox-furios

The plan going forward is to maintain it like our other upstream soft-forks (such as gnome-control-center or phosh) by keeping upstream in the upstream branch (and merge new tags), and rebasing our changes onto a clean branch such as forky (or whichever branch corresponds to the current suite), business as usual like all other soft forks we rebase every release.

Note: There is always the possibility of unarchiving this project in the future for further experimentation or production use. For now, however, we will be switching back to MCF and performing periodic rebases every few months.

furios-firefox-tweaks

Mobile and privacy friendly configuration for current standard and extended support releases of Firefox.

What this config does

• Adapt UI elements and "about:" pages to small screen sizes (when opened on small screen)
• Enable mobile gestures
• 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.

For users: making changes

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 pull request.

Contributing changes to userChrome

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 to true
  • Change devtools.debugger.remote-enabled to true
  • The debugger will only listen on localhost by default. If you know what you are doing, you may set devtools.debugger.force-local to false, so it listens on all interfaces. Otherwise you'll need something like an SSH tunnel.
  • Close firefox
  • Set up environment variables properly, so you can start programs (one lazy way to do it, is tmux on your phone in the terminal, then tmux a in SSH)
  • Run firefox --start-debugger-server 6000 (or another port if you desire)
• Run Firefox on your PC
  • Go to about:debugging
  • Add your phone as "network location" (10.15.19.82:6000 if connected through USB Network)
  • Press the connect button on the left
• 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
• 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.

Log file

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)

Coding guidelines

• 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.

Additional resources

• 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