Recreating My Firefox Profile

Published: ← 2011-06-25 →
Category: ← Code →
Tags: ← Firefox  → customization nerd pride ← yak shave  →

With the release of Firefox 5 a few days ago, I thought it was time to recreate my Firefox profile. You may not know what it is because you only have one: it’s the set of your add-ons, bookmarks, history, and every other kind of customization you can do to Firefox.

As a web developer, I have a half-dozen for testing reasons, but one that I use for all of my personal browsing and most of my work. Very infrequently, I’ve noticed that it sometimes would have errors on web pages that other Firefox profiles didn’t. After some thinking, I realized that I’ve been copying the same Firefox profile nearly ten years, copying it between computers as I upgrade. And all the while I’ve been tinkering with it, poking around in its config files, testing extensions, changing options in about:config.

I wanted a fairly mindless activity today, so I recreated my profile from scratch, re-installing all my extensions and configuring everything just the way I like it. It took a few hours, and my notes ended up surprisingly long.

The few times I’ve thought about switching to Chrome I’ve looked for one or two of these add-ons and seen that there’s no equivalent. Now that I have these notes I can check comprehensively the next time I get the urge.

The notes will mostly be of interest to web developers. My browser is pretty heavily customized with tools, privacy protections, and productivity tweaks (mostly to make it feel like vim and allow me to pull things offline easily). It’s an intimidating list to look at, but it’s ten years of small changes every few weeks all at once.

Add-Ons

• AdBlock Plus http://adblockplus.org/en/
  • add EasyList (button in tab on startup)
  • ‘Options’ menu, uncheck ‘Show tabs on Flash and Java’
• Better Privacy
  • select any LSOs you want to keep
• Cookie Monster
  • uncheck “Automatically Reload...”
• Download Statusbar
  • General
    • check ‘Download speed’
    • uncheck ‘Keep a download history
    • check ‘Clear finished downloads when the browser closes’
    • ‘Automatically clear these filetypes’: *
    • after 90 seconds
  • Appearance - choose ‘Custom Style’
    • File Name Size: 9
    • Height: 13
    • check ‘Main Downloads Button’
    • check ‘Clear Finished Button’
    • check ‘Enable Speed Colors’

• FacebookBlocker

• Flashblock
  • check ‘Block Silverlight as well’
  • add any whitelist sites

• Greasemonkey

• LeechBlock
  • block tvtropes.com
  • General - check all

• Pentadactyl

  ~/.pentadactylrc

  ` `{lang=””}

  "1.0b4.3 (created: 2011/01/05 17:55:12)
  
  loadplugins '\.(js|penta)$'
  set guioptions=BrsC
  set runtimepath=/home/harkins/.pentadactyl
  set urlseparator=,,s
  
  " vim: set ft=pentadactyl:
  

• NoSquint
  • Zooming tab, uncheck ‘Show current zoom levels’
  • Set ‘Default full page zoom level’ to 100%
  • Exceptions tab, add .github.com, .tumblr.com, .blogspot.com, .posterous.com
• Pixlr Grabber
  • uncheck ‘To edit images’ and ‘To edit backgrounds’
  • select ‘Always save to desktop’

• Readability https://www.readability.com/addons

• RefControl
  • click ‘Edit’ button, choose ‘Block’ and check ‘3rd Party requests only’
  • outside of settings, right click button at bottom of window, remove icon

• Sauce Launcher https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/sauce-launcher/

• ScrapBook
  • Show up to: 10
• SQLite Manager
  • select ‘in a new tab’
  • uncheck ‘Always confirm’
  • uncheck everything in Prompts tab

• Tamper Data

• Tree Style Tab
  • Appearance
    • Skin ‘Sidebar’
    • Tree Twisties: choose ‘None’
  • Menu
    • uncheck all but ‘Reload this Tree’ and ‘Close this Tree’
  • New Tabs
    • uncheck ‘Always ask’
    • select ‘Open in new tabs’
  • Tree
    • uncheck ‘When a tab gets focus’
    • check ‘Double-click on a tab’
  • Advanced
    • uncheck ‘Enable Animation Effects’
    • uncheck ‘Show tree contents’
• UnPlug
  • Integration - uncheck all but tools menu
  • Downloads - ‘Preferred download method’: Save as

• User Agent Switcher

• Web Developer
  • General
    • Check to hide the context menu, confirmation, and informational
  • Validation
    • select CSS 3

Incompatible

These aren’t yet compatible with Firefox 5, so they didn’t get into my notes.

• Page Speed
• Resurrect Pages
• YSlow

GreaseMonkey Scripts

Sorry for the lack of titles, but this was annoying enough to compile already.

51281 62706 7705 23555 53547 60314 38516 31804 56690 100746 104489 38985 45032 75263 77801 94112 30646 23175 28374 29279 29682 29681 29829 29828 95298 29666 49366 74340 76300 45032

Toolbars

• right click on the toolbar, uncheck Web Development toolbar
• right click again, choose ‘Customize’, choose ‘Use Small Icons’ and remove:
  • read it later
  • search box
  • zoom buttons
  • home button
  • bookmarks button
  • FireBug button
  • drag GreaseMonkey button to status bar

Cookies

click on CookieMonster at bottom of window, click View Cookies, show exceptions.
‘Allow’ sites you regularly visit
‘Block’ google properties

Bookmarks menu -> Show all Bookmarks

‘Import and Backup’ -> Back up to json in old profile, Import ‘Choose File’ in new Same with ScrapBook - open sidebar, Tools, Import / Export, select all...

Edit -> Preferences

• General
  • ‘When Firefox starts’: Show my windows and tabs
  • ‘Home Page’: about:blank
• Tabs
  • check everything but ‘When I open a link in a new tab’
• Applications
  • search for VLC, Windows, and QuickTime, change items to ‘Always Ask’
• Privacy
  • check ‘Tell web sites I do not want to be tracked’
  • select ‘Firefox will’: Use custom settings for history
  • select ‘Keep until’: I close Firefox
  • select ‘When using the location bar, suggest’: History
• Security
  • uncheck ‘Remember passwords for sites’
• Advanced -> Update
  • uncheck ‘Search Engines’

about:config

• browser.autofocus false
• browser.dom.window.dom.enabled true (new)
• browser.history_expire_days 30
• browser.tabs.animate false
• browser.tabs.closeButtons 2
• browser.tabs.loadBookmarksInBackground true
• browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground true
• browser.tabs.selectOwnerOnClose false
• browser.zoom.full false
• browser.jsannoyances.disabled true (new)
• downbar.display.clearButton false
• downbar.display.mainButton false
• downbar.display.percent true
• downbar.function.useAnimation false
• network.http.pipelining true
• network.http.pipelining.maxrequests 8
• network.prefetch-next false

~/.mozilla/firefox/[profile]/chrome

userChrome.css

@namespace url(“http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul”);

/* don’t bold active tab title */ /* no longer works, argh */ tab[selected=”true”] { font-weight: normal !important; }

/* stop TreeStyleTab’s Sidebar theme from changing its color when in/active */ .tabbrowser-strip[treestyletab-style=”sidebar”][treestyletab-mode=”vertical”] { background-color: #ccc !important; }

userContent.css

` /* indicate nofollow links with a dotted blue underline */ a[rel~=nofollow] { border-bottom: 1px dotted blue !important; } `{lang=”javascript”}

Got any neat suggestions I’ve missed?