Firefox

A free and open-source web browser developed by Mozilla. Uses Gecko, an alternative browser engine.

Firefox is my browser of choice at the moment, and will likely be for the forseeable future given that I don’t want to contribute to Chromium’s increasing monopoly, and Mozilla doesn’t pull (as many) user-hostile moves as Google.

Resources

• Official Website

Extensions

No browser is useful without extensions (hence why I’ve never tried seriously using GNOME Web). Here are some of the ones I use with Firefox:

Aesthetic

• Adaptive Tab Bar Color — Makes Firefox’s tab bar adapt color based on the color of the webpage being viewed, and I just love how it looks and how it makes websites feel more integrated into my digital space.

Privacy/Security

• uBlock Origin(uBO) — The straight-up best adblocker once can install. A must-have for browsing the modern internet.
• Privacy Badger — A tracker blocker by the EFF. A good second line of defense when combined with uBO.
• DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials — An extension developed by DuckDuckGo that has various privacy-protecting features.
• MinerBlock — Attempts to block browser-based crypto miners. Especially considering I sometimes access the web from underpowered machines, it’s good to have around.
• Link Cleaner+ — Removes various tracking parameters from URLs, helps mitigate tracking across sites.
• Smart Referer — Automatically hides HTTP Referers and JavaScript Referers to help mitigate tracking across sites.
• HTTPZ — Attempts to redirect http requests to https when possible.

Honestly, as I compile this list I realize that some of these extensions are quite redundant, but don’t feel like fixing what ain’t broken.

Utility

• User Agent Switcher — Allows users to manually set their user agent. This is really helpful as a Linux user, for websites that turn away non-Windows/Mac user agents for no clear reason.
• [Temporary Containers]https://github.com/stoically/temporary-containers) — A companion to Firefox containers that lets users spin up temporary, ephemeral containers. Unexpectedly useful.
• Tab Unloader — Allows the user to manually suspend tabs. Really useful on machines with low RAM.

Tips and Tricks

Enabling Wayland Support

Wayland support can be enabled in Firefox using the MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 environment variable. On the flatpak version, this is easily done using Flatseal.