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Comment by WD-42 | Hacker News Reader

The amount of stuff you need to disable on a fresh Firefox install now is getting ridiculous. In settings you need to uncheck:

1. Recommend extensions as you browse

2. Recommend features as you browse

3. Sponsored Shortcuts

4. Recommended stories/Sponsored stories

5. Show trending search suggestions

6. Suggestions from Firefox

7. Suggestions from sponsors

8. Allow Firefox to install and run studies

9. Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement 10. Everything AI related in Firefox Labs

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One of the most ridiculous hassles is having to connect to the internet to disable an add-on. Mozilla apparently needs to be notified every time a Firefox user disables or enables uBlock Origin.

I didn’t knew this and it’s completely unacceptable. In a real project it would be classified as a bug, and a quick fix would be done for that.

10. Disable Pocket with "extensions.pocket.enabled = false"

11. Disable Privacy Preserving Attribution using "dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled = false"

I like the stories suggested by Pocket, they seems to be from trusted sources and the personalization seems to happen locally[1].

>Are these stories in the new tab personalized to me?

> For the most part, no. Most recommendations on your new tab come from a general list of the best stories on the web. But Pocket is actively exploring ways to deliver personalized recommendations in a way that vigorously protects users’ privacy. Importantly, neither Mozilla nor Pocket ever receives a copy of your browser history. When personalization does occur, recommendations rely on a process of story sorting and filtering that happens locally in your personal copy of Firefox.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/pocket-recommendations-...

I like the stories too! Still doesn’t mean Pocket has any business being forcibly built into my browser, though.

Disable harmful website checking too (url leak).

What URL leak? There is a database of malicious URLs that is downloaded by Firefox periodically. It doesn’t use a remote database lookup on demand.

Is there a way to automate this and commit it to a dotfiles repository so that it always gets applied?

You can disable most of these things in user.js. See https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js (née ghacks.net user.js) for an example.

The next problem is FF generates random profile names by default ( ~/.mozilla/firefox/<random>/user.js ) which makes it hard to deploy a user.js via automation. But you can also drop in a ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini with a fixed profile name of your choice, so then you can use dotfiles or any other mechanism to deploy those two files.

That said, as the original tweet says, they did this particular one by adding new user.js options, so you wouldn't be *automatically* protected from them. You could try to find someone who publishes the exact user.js you want to use to some git repo / URL and set up automation to sync that file to your devices periodically. Unfortunately most user.js have some common elements but also some personal unique elements (because you may want to not change some settings because they break websites you care about), so you may not find such a person.

https://github.com/yokoffing/BetterFox

I set this up once, sometimes do a git pull, and honestly, I can't see "annoyances" others always complain about. Maybe I look at the wrong places / learned to ignore them. Or maybe it's BetterFox removing them. Worth a try.

Edit: https://github.com/yokoffing/Betterfox/wiki/Common-Overrides...

They already included instructions on how to disable it. However, since the defaults also disable most of the new tab clutter, it wasn't shown to me in the first place.

Just use fork of FF. LibreWolf.

https://librewolf.net/

I had no idea LibreWolf supports Firefox Sync, that's pretty much the only reason I'm using Firefox so I'll definitely try it out.

Eh, every time there's a bigger change in Firefox someone forks it, and then the project dies after some time.

LibreWolf is a live since March 2020, still updated regularly.

From what I know it’s one of those forks that disable so much that a lot of web apps become unusable.

Such as?

And much much more: https://unixdigest.com/articles/choose-your-browser-carefull...

Keep in mind that this isn't for everyone.

It's one of the reasons I gave up on Firefox. Mozilla have no incentive to improve Firefox and can afford to keep running it into the ground knowing Google has to foot the bill for them to not get hit with the monopoly hammer by the US and EU governments.

I agree that it sucks. But does it really suck more than the alternative (Blink monopoly and terrible vertical tabs implementations)?. No way. I made most of these changes years ago and have just migrated my Firefox profiles directory since.

An alternative you might consider is LibreWolf, a privacy-preserving fork of Firefox.

what did you choose to move to

Here's my aproximate browser history since I started using the internet. IE(2002) -> Firefox(2004) -> Opera(2008) -> Firefox(2011) -> Chrome(2015-present) -> Brave (probably in the near future)

Let me guess... Another Blink engine browser?

And you can't set new tabs to default to your home page, allegedly because of "security issues." Yet every other browser can handle it.

And then there's the idiotic burying of bookmarks three levels deep on the mobile version.

Oh, and the storage of log-in credentials blows. When you pick a saved log-in ID on a site, Firefox is too dumb to find the matching password. It shows you every password for every ID you've used on the site, and you have to scroll through them.

I really wanted to support Firefox so I switched back to it from Safari recently. But it sucks ass.

Firefox stopped using 'browser.newtab.url' long time ago as it was a preferred attack surface for male are trying to redirect people to scam pages. I understand that you are annoyed but you can still use an addon to do that which gives you more control.

I don't know about other browsers and how they handle the abuse of this situation or if they care at all. But it is not like there did it just to annoy people.

How would a scammer change my browser.newtab.url?

How would a scammer be able to change my browser.newtab.url without an attacker also being able to change my network.proxy.http?

"Firefox stopped using 'browser.newtab.url' long time ago"

That doesn't really mean anything to the end user (including me). If the implementation was flawed, the answer isn't just to abolish the entire feature.

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