Firefox is the last mainstream browser standing against the onslaught of Chromium. I use Firefox and variants. Floorp is my daily driver. I use others for different purposes, such as Librewold on Linux and Waterfox on Android for accessing Meta web services.
Firefox still has the best adblocking and privacy features of all the mainstream browsers available.
Like all software, there are tweaks that can be done to make it better.
Stop Google login iframes
Are you tired of going to website and having a popup asking you to log into Google? It really bugs me. Thankfully, there is a tweak in the uBlock Origin extension to banish it forever.
In the uBlock Origin My Filters tab add:
||accounts.google.com/gsi/*
The screen where it is added looks like this:
Erratic scrolling
I recently upgraded my Dell XPS 17 with Debian Trixie. Everything went great except suddenly scrolling withe the touch pad was very erratic.
Whenever I’d scroll up or down to a specific location in web page once I lifted my fingers from the touch pad the scrolling would be keep moving. Not what was wanted and quite annoying.
I went back and forth with the settings for the touchpad in Gnome Settings. No difference.
Then I realized is was only the browser that was showing this problem. I tried turning on/off snooth scrolling and it didn’t really help. Grumble, grumble.
After an hour or so it was really annoying me, unusable even. There must be something that can be done. Poking around in about:config and searching for ‘scroll’ I found:
apz.gtk.kinetic_scroll.enabled
set to ’true’. Setting it to false fixed it!
How to access about:config in Firefox Mobile
Firefox and about:config and mobile devices…
In the URL bar put:
chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml
Turn off ‘Privacy-Preserving Ad-Measurement’ in Firefox Mobile
‘Privacy-Preserving Ad-Measurement’ has been a real hot-button topic. You want to turn this off on all devices. Funnily enough, the interface to turn it off in Firefox mobile does not exist. In order to work around that, go into about:config as shown above. Search for dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled and ensure it is set to false.
Extensions I Use
Some of these are for privacy enhancement, some are just quality of life things.
- Cookie Autodelete: Automatically delete unwanted cookies from your closed tabs while keeping the ones you want.
- cookies.txt: Exports all cookies to a Netscape HTTP Cookie File, as used by curl, wget, and youtube-dl, among others. Great for scripting!
- Dark Reader: Dark mode for every website. Great for late night reading & hacking in bed from your tablet. I’m not the only one, right?
- I don’t care about cookies: Get rid of cookie warnings from almost all websites!
- Privacy Badger: Privacy Badger automatically learns to block invisible trackers.
- Pure URL: Removes garbage like “utm_source” from URLs — helps reduce referrer tracking.
- Remove FBclid and UTM: Removes fbclid, ysclid, gclid, and utm_ query parameters in URLs. More tracking garbage removal.
- SingleFile: Save a complete page into a single HTML file.
- tab list: Show a list of open tabs for easy backup. I find this one really handy for when I’m researching something, have a zillion tabs open, and don’t necessarily want to pollute my bookmarks with something that I may not ultimately want to bookmark. Cut-n-paste this payload to a text file.
- TrackMeNot: Protect against data profiling by search engines
- uBlock Origin: Finally, an efficient blocker. Easy on CPU and memory. If there’s one extension you should try to install, this is it.
Special Mention
- NoScript: Maximum protection for your browser: NoScript allows active content only for trusted domains of your choice to prevent exploitation.
This extension is a bit of a workload to maintain. You have to manage the list of what it blocks and does not block and it can be cumbersome at times. It does work though. When it is turned off for an extended period I do notice an increase in targeted advertising. It can also be quite troublesome with e-commerce and banking sites. It is still worth trying to see if you like it.
Thanks for reading.