foxglove

foxglove

Foxglove is a Firefox wrapper with two purposes:

• Programatically generate Firefox profiles with preferences that I consider desirable for the majority of use cases. These disable, where possible, Firefox's built-in advertising, pop-ups, telemetry, experiments, and similar features. Generated profiles are stored in ~/.foxglove.

• If a remote host is given, ssh to it and use that connection as a SOCKS proxy. In either case, launch Firefox.

usage: foxglove [-h] [--chrome path] [--content path] [-d] [-e] [-a add-on] profile [host]

foxglove - a Firefox profile and proxy manager

positional arguments:
  profile         the name of the foxglove-managed profile to use or create
  host            ssh server hostname. If this option is given, foxglove will attempt to use ssh(1) to connect to the host and configure Firefox to use it
                  as a SOCKS proxy

optional arguments:
  -h, --help      show this help message and exit
  --chrome path   path to a userChrome.css file to add to the profile
  --content path  path to a userContent.css file to add to the profile
  -d              dry run (don't launch Firefox)
  -e              ephemeral (delete profile on exit)
  -a add-on       download and install this add-on. Use the name as it appears in the Mozilla add-ons site URL. May be used multiple times

To use the "host" argument, configure a corresponding Host entry in your ~/.ssh/config such that you can ssh to it with no additional arguments. The remote host must allow port forwarding.

Foxglove launches Firefox via a subprocess call to "firefox". On MacOS, the Firefox binary is not typically in PATH, so foxglove first appends /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS to PATH. Prepending another directory to PATH may be used to select a particular Firefox installation. For example, you might launch Firefox Nightly on MacOS like this:

PATH="/Applications/Firefox Nightly.app/Contents/MacOS:$PATH" foxglove example

Preferences

These settings have changed substantially during Firefox's development, so some may be unsupported or meaningless in current versions.

Preference changes made to a foxglove-managed profile will reset to foxglove's default values on the next run. To retain changes, you can either use the generated profile as a normal Firefox profile without foxglove, or modify your installation of foxglove's prefs.js file with your desired preferences.

Some foxglove defaults to consider changing:

Key	Default	Foxglove	Comments
dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled	true	false	May break some sites
privacy.resistFingerprinting	false	false	May break some sites; can be counterproductive
privacy.donottrackheader.enabled	false	true	May be used for fingerprinting
network.trr.mode	0	0	TRRs can interfere with test environments

Related projects

• Firefox Profilemaker