##### Add-ons ######

No matter what platform you're on you should consider installing the following add-ons.

1) Ublock Origin - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/

If you only install one add-on from this list it should be this one. This is the best version of ublock and it will block a lot of ads and tons of third party scripts by default greatly improving your day-to-day browsing. I don't think I need to say more about why an adblocker is a good idea.

2) NoScript - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/

I also run Noscript which blocks all thirdparty (and most first party) javascript on web pages by default. This breaks A LOT of websites now. But most websites function fine by only enabling one or two scripts (usually first party scripts). At first you may find it annoying but it remembers your preferences. So it very useful after you've set it up. Prevents a lot of crap from ad networks and malware ridden crap Ublock doesn't catch from executing. Can greatly speed up load times.

3) Decentraleyes - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/decentraleyes/

Continuing with blocking cancer trend we have Decentraleyes. Which blocks a lot of snooping by major providers like google. Maybe not required if you have strict noscript rules. But doesn't hurt to have it running anyway.

4) Sidebery - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/

You will need this to replicate my own config. This is an add-on for tree-style side bar tabs. Firefox offers its own sidebar tabs now but they're pretty crappy compared to this add-on. I highly suggest using this instead and disabling the default (we're going to do that later with userchrome)

5) Vimium - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff

Allows you to navigate and do basic things using Vim keys (hjkl to scroll for example). I use it all of the time but maybe not for everyone.

6) enhanced-h264ify - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/enhanced-h264ify/

This add-on forces websites like youtube and other streaming services to send h.264 video instead of av1 and newer codecs. Very useful on a lot of machines that do not support hardware decoding of newer video formats.

7) Don't "Accept" image/webp - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dont-accept-webp/

Like the above but for images. This forces websites to send non-webp images. Which prevents major CDNs from sending you badly re-encoded versions of png/jpeg/bmp/etc files in-route. This is better than using about:config because it doesn't break websites that do not support sending non-webp images (like youtube thumbnails). You'll want this if you spend a lot of time browsing major platforms for art.

8) Tweaks for YouTube - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tweaks-for-youtube/

Note: I have not used this add-on. I use something called "Enhancer for youtube" instead. But the author of that add-on has removed it from distro and refuses to say what Mozilla did to piss him off. There are a large number of similar add-ons for "fixing" youtube. But I haven't had a chance to try out any of them and compare them to the one I have now yet. Whenever I do (and the one I'm using now stops working) I'll try to come back to update this.

Right now just be aware there are a ton of add-ons like this that improve how youtube works in Firefox. Most of them have tweaks that remove the constant churn of Google "updates" for youtube or give you quality of life features like slow-mo/freeze-frame etc.

9) Return YouTube Dislike - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/return-youtube-dislikes

A simple add-on that returns the dislike button to youtube videos.

10) SponsorBlock - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/

Continuing with the youtube theme we have Sponsorblock. An add-on that will auto skip sections of shilling in youtube videos. Note that another user of the add-on must mark sections before it will auto-skip so on very new videos someone might have not gotten around to it yet (you can submit them if you want to help). Also note that youtubers are massive fags and have started to complain about this. The author of the add-on sometimes bows to their demands (and probably gets paid to remove data). But for the most part it works well and makes youtube far less annoying that usual.

11) Simple Translate - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-translate/

A simple add-on that lets you highlight text and have it auto translated. Very useful.

12) Translate Web Pages - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/traduzir-paginas-web/

Same as above but for entire web pages

13) Old Reddit Redirect - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-redirect/

When you're forced to use reddit for tech support/as a forum this makes it far less kuso. Automatically re-directs you to old.reddit.com and gives you the old layout before they went all-in on mobile webshit.

14) Old Wiki - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-wiki/

Same as above but for wikipedia.

Could go on with add-ons all day. Search the extensions database and find more. One last one...

15) Dark Reader - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/darkreader/

I pause suggesting this although I use it on some websites. This will automatically re-render a webpage into "dark mode" if you prefer that. Some people worry about the author collecting metadata and it can sometimes consume A LOT of CPU on javascript heavy websites. All that said I still find it useful for websites where I haven't written my own CSS stylesheet (or am too lazy to do it). You can keep it off by default and only turn it on when you go to some website you don't normally visit. That's what I do and I don't let it run in private windows.

Next we're going to talk about about:config settings.

#### about:config ####

These are "advanced" Firefox settings that change behavior of the browser/browser engine. A lot of these can not be toggled from the default settings interface. I'm just going to cover them here instead of attempting to walk you through the GUI. Note these may or may not have an effect depending on your platform and driver support. I'll try to explain why I use certain settings and if they don't work on non-UNIX platforms.

To access about:config type "about:config" into the url bar and press enter. You will most likely get a warning page here. Click through it (toggle option to disable further warnings if you'd like) then you'll be presented with a search prompt. Type in the settings that follow then you can toggle their values in the GUI.

#################################
Custom user chrome
#################################

To use custom .css to modify firefox's GUI you'll need to enable the following option. So we'll cover it first.

- toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets: set to "true" to enable ability to use custom userchrome.css (we'll cover how and where that file is created later)

###################################

With the above out of the way let's go over some other settings:

- app.normandy.first_run - set to "false" to prevent sending meta data back to Mozilla. Highly suggest you disable it. This is their backdoor into the browser to change your settings without consulting you.

- app.normandy.migrationsApplied - set to "12" to disable it fully.

- browser.backspace_action - set to "0" to make the backspace key function as the back button. No idea why this is no longer the default.

- browser.cache.disk.enable - set to "false" to prevent firefox from attempting to write disk cache constantly. Can greatly improve speed on most computers.

- browser.cache.memory.enable - set to "true" to direct all caching operations to RAM. Same reason as above.

- browser.compactmode.show - set to "true" to restore the old GUI menus so they don't take up a ton of space for no reason. Will need this set to true to replicate my config.

- browser.discovery.enabled - set to "false" to disable telemetry/data collection from Mozilla. Highly suggested you disable this.

- network.prefetch-next - set to "false" to disable Mozilla's server from pre-fetching links (and snooping upon what you type)

- network.dns.disablePrefetch - set to "true" to disable DNS prefetching

- network.http.speculative-parallel-limit - set to "0" to disable speculative pre-connections.

- messaging-system.rsexperimentloader.enabled - set to "false" to disable Mozilla studies/experiments

- app.shield.optoutstudies.enabled - set to "false" to disable running Mozilla studies/experiments

- browser.search.geoip.url - Set to a blank string to prevent your browser from being included in Mozilla's geolocation lookup. Note this will prevent geolocation based search results on major web search engines from functioning (no big deal, just include your zip code in search string)

- browser.startup.homepage_override.mstone - set to "ignore" to disable the "what's new" firefox homepage.

Continued in next post.

>>5050
>- app.normandy.first_run - set to "false" to prevent sending meta data back to Mozilla. Highly suggest you disable it. This is their backdoor into the browser to change your settings without consulting you.

As expected I missed an important one here. You'll also want to set:

- app.normandy.enabled - set to "false" to totally disable sending meta data back to Mozilla.

Working on the rest of these posts. Sorry there are a ton of about:config options to cover.

>>5049
>3) Decentraleyes - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/decentraleyes/

Also my guide is out of date. Instead of Decentraleyes you should run LocalCDN instead: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/localcdn-fork-of-decentraleyes/

Which is a fork that gets updates.

I also forgot to tell you to install ClearURLs

Clearurls - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clearurls/

Which is a simple add-on that removes tracking data from urls so you don't copy/paste them.

Last but not least another add-on I suggest is Violentmonkey: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/violentmonkey/

Back to about:config in a bit...

For now I'll pause from about:config settings and explain how to set-up custom userchrome.css and how to install my own config as see in the OP. You can find the .css file of my config here:

https://files.catbox.moe/6874u1.css

You'll need it for later. Note the comments which will give you the source github repo where all these changes came from. My own config is rather simple and may not be 100% to your liking. Be prepared to experiment so you can make your own. You can find several other modifications and scripts at the included repo link.

We've already set what we need in about:config but if you skipped that you can find instructions in this post: >>5050 under "Custom user chrome".

Next we'll need to locate your profile folder. This can be in various places. On UNIX OSs it's usually located in ~/.mozilla/ directory and on Windows somewhere inside %APPDATA%. Thankfully, there is an easy way to locate it through the browser.

Type "about:support" into your url bar and press enter. On the new page that opens under "Application Basics" locate "Profile Folder". You can click "open directory" button if you have a GUI file manager or navigate to the PATH given on the CLI. The full path on one of my machines looks like this:
>/home/username/.mozilla/firefox/<randomstring>.default-default-<randomnumbers>/

Inside of your profile folder you need to create a new directory called "chrome". Like this:
>/home/username/.mozilla/firefox/<randomstring>.default-default-<randomnumbers>/chrome/

Then inside of the new chrome folder create a file called "userChrome.css". Like so:
>touch userChrome.css
or with your GUI by creating a new text file however it's done. Just be mindful that the name and extension are correct.

After you've done that copy/paste the contents of my custom userChrome.css above into this new file. Close the browser then re-start it. Assuming you have Sidebery installed you should get my customized layout with functioning sidebar tabs that collapse when you do not hover over them.

Depending on your settings you may need to enable the sidebar using the toggle in the header and/or disabling "show sidebar" under settings. From time to time they push an update that breaks this and sometimes I have to fiddle with these settings before the top bar goes away and the side bar functions correctly. No guarantee this will work right off for your OS/config but I'll help you if it doesn't.

Right now I have horizontal tabs enabled (although they're hidden), vertical tabs enabled (although the built-in ones are hidden) and "Show Sidebar" disabled. You can find all three of these settings under the hamburger -> settings menu by typing "sidebar" into the search prompt.

Also I've hidden it in my own config but the default button for controlling this usually works as well after you click it a couple of times.

You can find a large collection of CSS hacks for Firefox on this github repo: https://github.com/MrOtherGuy/firefox-csshacks

Make sure to read the comments as you may need to slightly modify some things within the code depending on your OS/platform.

>>5053
>vertical tabs enabled
Small correction. I have them DISABLED. Otherwise, they will appear next to the sidebery tabs.

The built-in vertical tabs are awful. I highly suggest you do not use them and use sidebery instead.

HARDWARE ACCELERATION

I'll try to get back to important about:config settings later. But for now these are the most important. By default a lot of UNIX platforms disable hardware acceleration within Firefox despite the fact that if you have a working GPU most likely it will work fine. I have no idea why they do this (same distros typically don't have this problem with Chrome). But it's easy enough to get it working.

Maybe you got lucky and it just werks? To check type in "about:support" then scroll down to "Graphics". There you will find much information related to hardware accel and compositing. Most of the time you'll discover you're in a blacklist or it's disabled by default. We can force enable these things with a few about:config changes.

###################################

gfx.webgpu.ignore-blocklist - set to "true" to ignore all blacklisted drivers (usually they are out of date and are blacklisted due to already fixed bugs)

gfx.webrender.all - set to "true" to force hardware accel webrendering

gfx.webrender.compositor - set to "true"

gfx.webrender.compositor.force-enabled - set to "true"

gfx.webrender.enable-gpu-markers - set to "true"

gfx.x11-egl.force-enabled - set to "true" (maybe not needed on wayland? I dunno)

webgl.force-enabled - set to "true" to force enable hardware accel webgl

webgl.msaa-force - set to "true"

The above should get hardware decoding of youtube and hardware acceleration for webpages working on most Linux/Unix OSs with AMD/Nvidia GPU.

##################################
Other misc. fixes
##################################

Firefox sometimes doesn't play nice with certain WMs because it's expected certain enviroment variables to be set. Don't worry I got you.

First to make it play nice with non-KDE/Gnome WMs simply set XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP to anything. I use LXQt. Like so

>In the file ~/.xsession or ~/.bashrc or ~/.kshrc or ~/.zshrc or whatever you generally use to set global env var;
>export XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=LXQt

You can set the above to "gnome" or "sway" or whatever. But it seems to work better on some WMs if you fake a KDE/Gnome based DE. Otherwise the window may not render correctly.

Next we have a couple of env vars to ensure hardware accel/rendering works correctly. These may not be required since we've forced those settings on in about:config. But setting them won't harm anything and will ensure they work correctly should our about:config settings or profile get corrupted (maybe).

>In the file ~/.xsession or ~/.bashrc or ~/.kshrc or ~/.zshrc or whatever you generally use to set global env var;
>export MOZ_ACCELERATED=1
>export MOZ_WEBRENDER=1

Now everything should be working correctly. Close the browser, re-open then navigate to "about:support" to verify hardware acceleration and rendering is enabled and running correctly. Note this will only work after you've setup your drivers correctly of course.

I will come back with more tips soon. I will try to finish about:config piracy settings but more importantly. I will teach you how to direct the constant firefox writes to disk to RAM (via tmpfs/mfs). Sadly, our changes before don't totally disable them because Mozilla thinks they own our machines and have the right to nuke our SSDs.

Further more, I will go over ways to further secure Firefox on various platforms by teaching you how to run it inside of chroot/jail. As well as discuss the most secure version of the browser. Which is the OpenBSD port. Where we'll cover how to configure pledge/unveil for the best experience without being a frustrating mess.

I planned to finish all of the above tonight but this has already taken much longer than I expected. I hope someone finds it helpful.

I find this extremely helpful and informative, thank you so much for the effort! I appreciate info dumps like this a lot because they make things more accessible to people like me, the forced h264 for example is something I wouldn't even have thought to look up, same for forcing caching on RAM.

If the suggested version turns out to not be LibreWolf, could you explain some of the details behind that so we have some sort of comparison for a better understanding?

Another thing I'm wondering is if there are any other ways to force past web standards for potential use on older machines with equally as old hardware. For example, I have a dedicated XP system with a 6800 that I sometimes like to play around with and in-browser videos are a real pain, as are most other modern web elements. Obviously it's not a daily driver and there is no need for perfection, I just don't like having to boot up an entirely different system just to look up some tiny thing.

>>5055
It should be noted that hardware acceleration tends to reserve a couple hundred gigs of VRAM. If you're a gamer or local AI guy that VRAM can be the difference between smooth sailing or pain.
People would need to check what they're actually using, though, since most people probably won't be cutting it that close.

ublock has noscript functionality built in, just set global to block 1st and 3rd party scripts and save it.

>>5057
Not a huge deal. If you quit the browser before doing those tasks then re-open it then it won't hog up the VRAM. You should get in the habit of closing your browser at least once every 2-3 days anyway to force it to free system RAM.

>>5058
While this is true NoScript still offers more fine grained blocking and the interface is much better. Which is why I continue to run both.

>>5056
I'll try to answer you questions when I have more time.

Just figured out why FF was being such a piece of shit on my PC, it's because it decided to use the second GPU that's getting half power in my PC for some reason, I guess because it's NVIDIA? But, now I need to go about figuring out a way to blacklist that gpu from being used by all the glitchy programs that now exist because they want to use this GPU I have in a secondary slot EXCLUSIVELY to be used for VMs because they hate me. Why would FF do this?

>>5100
Sounds complicated. Maybe it's some sort of load balancing thing? I haven't had a dual GPU setup in like 15 years so I don't know what it's like these days.
So you're having issues with FF using the wrong GPU and it's making the performance poor? That's not something I'd ever expect.

>>5101
I was actually just retarded and had everything plugged into the second GPU, whoops haha glad I wasted 4 hours on that

>>5052
Thanks anon for the update on Decentraleyes! I've been running it for some time without knowing it was deprecated. Every extension I have is on your list except my two favourite ones, so I'll add these recommendations:
Bypass Paywalls Cleanly.
This one is so good Firefox doesn't even allow it on their store. You'll have to go to this russian github site: https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean#installation and follow the simple install instructions. After installed it automatically updates, keeping up to date with newer paywall methods. I honestly haven't been paywalled in months.

Tab Session Manager.
Saves groups of tabs for later use, very customisable. You can automatically save open tabs in set intervals of time, or not; you can tag the saved tabs by topics; etc. This, along with firefox not reopening tabs on start, cured me of keeping a billion tabs open.

For those starting to change about:config, another tip: Keep a log of all changes you make to it, specially if you're on Linux. I've spent many hours troubleshooting, reading mozilla forums and reddit looking for the exact about:config combination that after an update was bricking every site with a map in it. Had something to do with hardware acceleration on Linux with a Nvidia card, I don't remember how exactly.

Bookmarklet to bypass paywalls
javascript:(function(){if(location.href.indexOf('http')!=0){input=prompt('URL:','http://');if(input!=null){location.href='https://archive.ph/'+input}}else{location.href='https://archive.ph/'+location.href;}})();
Make a bookmark, paste this into URL field, and click it when a website asks you to subscribe or whatever. What this does is it opens up a website called archive.ph and feeds it the URL of the website you're getting paywalled on.

ff changed something in the font rendering department in one of the newer versions. it's a minor change, but it drives me absolute nuts. none of the fixes I've found online works, guess I will have to downgrade.

>>5048
Why not just use Librewolf, Pale Moon, Basilisk, etc. with uMatrix?

>>5318
Basilisk and/or Pale Moon has you covered.

>>5322
pale moon and floorp have the same issue, but basilisk seems to be fine! thank you, friend. I will switch to it later.

Odd that Betterfox isn't recommended. It just works.

Ideally stick the github release RSS feed into an RSS reader so you can keep it up to date.

I use firedragon, the best fork of a fork (and maybe of a fork) I ever tried.

>>5048
I went the opposite route and I use mullvad browser. It's basically tor browser and it has all the security features of tor browser but without the tor networking. You can use a vpn with it if you want.

Thanks for the recommendations, OP.
My favorite extension is auto tab groups because I like having 100+ tabs open
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-groups/

>>5431
I like to manually, create my own groups. But for a gorillion tabs, the best extension is "Auto Tab Discard" that makes them turn off after a while so the tabs you're not using get in sleep mode so they don't waste your precious RAM.

>>5433
This one is great. If you have ADHD like me, it even saves youtube timestamps.

>>5534
I didn't know it saved the youtube timestamps, I thought those were saved on the account history. But I always open three hundred videos, watch them a bit, and return to them later, so is a life saver having the saved timestamp. I think without that extension my computer RAM wouldn't handle my ADHD of having opened thousands of tabs.

>>5535
It especially goes well with ublock since youtube tries to load so much shit that gets blocked that it just starts leaking memory eventually if you leave it idling in the background too long.

>>5536
Is crazy how much resources youtube consumes, when something like a youtube frontend can do the same with not even a fraction of the resources: Load video, load video suggestions on the corner (with all the covers and PNGs), load comments etc...

Every now and then Firefox runs like SHIT and looking in the task manager I kept seeing this "eco mode" thing, and apparently you can disable it with:

dom.ipc.processPriorityManager.backgroundUsesEcoQoS set to False

Also, unchecked "Use recommended performance settings", which allows selecting "Use hardware acceleration when available"

Firefox seems to be running better. Kind of infuriating that they push updates that maybe help efficiency on newer CPUs but make older CPUs run like poop.