Disable everything but the search bar. This gives a clean page, of a
cog wheel on the top right where the user can adjust it as they want
(e.g. enable most frequently visited pages), then the FF logo and the
search bar.
I've considered enabling TopSites in order to show the most frequently
visited sites according to the browser's history. However, this also
enables built-in links to youtube, facebook, reddit, amazon, twitter.
And while it is convenient to have links you frequently visit available
(based on your history, not these built-ins!), getting an almost blank
page instead is actually a good idea to reduce the bad pattern of
opening a web browser and then forgetting your original intention until
it opens, and instead surfing mindlessly on the most recently visited
websites. The almost blank page gives the user a moment to think about
what they really want to do.
Here's something controversial. Install the wide-spectrum blocker uBlock
origin by default. This enables blocking of ads, trackers and malware
sites. I think these should be blocked for several reasons:
1. Performance on mobile devices
It's clear when browsing the web with this add-on, that there is a major
performance benefit in blocking advertising and tracking on websites. We
don't have these resources to waste on Mobile Linux.
2. Privacy
From uBlock origin's README.md:
> [...] it's important to note that using a blocker is NOT theft. Don't fall
> for this creepy idea. The ultimate logical consequence of blocking = theft
> is the criminalisation of the inalienable right to privacy.
> Ads, "unintrusive" or not, are just the visible portions of privacy-invading
> apparatus entering your browser when you visit most sites nowadays. uBlock
> Origin's main goal is to help users neutralize such privacy-invading
> apparatus — in a way that welcomes those users who don't wish to use more
> technical, involved means (such as uMatrix).
3. Manipulation
Modern advertising platforms are used to manipulate people in the scale
of influencing elections of world leaders. From Cambridge Analytica and
similar companies' perspective, one of the workflows is showing the user
an advertisement, then monitoring search queries to determine if the ad
was effective, then adjusting the ad to convince you better to vote for
a certain party, repeat. This has severe negative effects on society,
for people unfamiliar with the topic I recommend watching the movies
"The Great Hack" and "The Social Dilemma". The mentioned workflow is
described in the "Your Undivided Attention" podcast, episode 10, "Rock
the Voter" in an interview with a former Cambridge Analyticer insider.
Related: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
Related: cab6a5076c/README.md (policiesjson-45)
Related: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/
Apply a similar hack to the "all tabs" menu, as the appMenu has, so it
gets a proper height and doesn't jump above or below the "all tabs"
button, depending on the keyboard being displayed or not. With this
hack, it stays consistently above the button.
Adjust the menu for Firefox 94, and for having the tab bar and search
bar at the bottom.
Getting the appMenu to look decent took me forever to figure out, here's
a notable alternative version that always uses the full screen height:
#appMenu-popup {
margin-top: calc(-1 * 100vh) !important;
height: calc(100vh - 100px) !important;
max-height: calc(100vh - 100px) !important;
}
However with this alternative version, there's a bug when having the
keyboard open, then opening the menu (-> it will get spawned with about
half the screen size), and then closing the keyboard and opening the
menu again. The menu is cached (as one can see in the element inspector)
and still has the wrong height. The content inside the menu is
flickering between the full height and the half height.
By having a fixed size that looks good with both the keyboard open and
closed, we can work around this problem. The height of the keyboard was
adjusted for the PinePhone. If it doesn't look good on your device, add
a media query to make it have a different height based on the overall
height of the window (and possibly also width).
Based on MR 17 by plata-gl, thank you very much, and thanks to everybody
who answered the survey linked in that MR whether to make this default
or not.
I've left out padding-top since the additional 1px bar towards the top
looks like a bug, I've compared with Fennec on Android and it doesn't
have such a line. Also I've left out the inFullscreen lines from the MR,
not sure what they are for - we can still add them in a follow-up patch
if desired.
In the Tor browser user agent, the "geckotrail" part has been changed.
Apparently following an upstream change in Firefox:
> From Firefox 10 on mobile, geckotrail is the same as firefoxversion.
Note: I'm simply running latest Tor browser on Android and visit
websites showing the user agent to figure out the latest one. I tried to
figure it out from the source code once, but didn't find a place where
it could be looked up trivially (since it gets built of multiple
components etc.).
Related: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/User-Agent/Firefox
Preferences set with `pref()` can be changed by the user, but they're
then reset on each Firefox startup.
As users may want a different UA and keep it persistent, we should set
the default value with `defaultPref()` instead. This requires moving the
preference to the autoconfig file though, as `defaultPref()` isn't
recognized in the main config file.
Adds stylesheets for some "about:" pages, the pages were chosen depending
on importance for user.
preferences.css was moved to sidebar.css since changes in this file could
be applied for more pages and were related only to sidebar.
Adds copyrights
addons.mozilla.org displays the following message when visiting it with
the Android Firefox user agent now, while also graying out the usual
button to install the add-on:
You can install this add-on in the Add-ons Manager. Learn more
about add-ons for Android.
It is not possible to use a different user agent just for this website
anymore, as it used to be with "general.useragent.site_specific_overrides"
(see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1589607). Therefore,
just explain that one can press the "Download file" button to install
add-ons.
When trying to install uBlock origin as suggested on the start page, I
found that the text of the popup is taking up so much space that the
"Add" / "Cancel" buttons are missing again. Decrease the font size even
further (like in the "Site information"), so the buttons are visible
again.
If somebody wants to improve this: maybe we could give the
popup-notification-body a fixed height instead, and make it scrollable?
Patches welcome, and see README.md for instructions how to use the
Firefox developer tools with the browser UI itself.
Remove the rule that makes it go 50px to the left and 20px to the right.
While this added some more space for editing the URL, it looked weird.
After having used it for a while, I think it's better to remove this
again.
The userChrome.css in the user's profile will be overwritten when the
package is upgraded.
Any change should therefore be made to the file located under /etc,
which should then be left untouched by most package managers.
Firefox can run an autoconfig Javascript on startup, which can be used to
install and update userChrome.css, both when creating a new profile and
using a pre-existing one.
This removes the need for a wrapper script and related complications
(changes to $PATH, different processing for new and pre-existing
profiles...)
Co-Authored-By: Oliver Smith <ollieparanoid@postmarketos.org>
The reason for disabling these was, to free up space in the menu. The
menu entry is hidden in userChrome.css now, so we can enable it again.
Having this enabled is required to use the Firefox remote debugger,
which is very useful for developing userChrome.css.
Always start with --profile if there is no profiles.ini. Otherwise,
firefox will create and use the profile for the first start only, but
not set it as default. It would create a new profile on the second start
then.
Instead of trying to override the .desktop entry of Firefox by
installing the custom one and adjusting XDG_DATA_DIRS, just wrap the
firefox binary directly and adjust PATH. The former did not work with
Phosh, and on second thought, wrapping the binary is what's really
necessary. The launcher would have been just another useless layer.
