Firefox

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Mozilla Firefox is the main standard in FOSS Web browsers.

Contents

Tips

Putting "about:home" in the location bar to see and modify Firefox settings.

Alternates

Due to branding issues, in Debian GNU/Linux, the Firefox application is re-named "Iceweasel" and all Mozilla branding is removed.

Adding Search Engines

In essence, use (eg.) Favicon Generator to generate a 16x16 Icon

Use

uuencode -m favicon.ico favicon.b64

to convert to a base64 data URI (see Favicon) to convert to base64.

Edit the .xml file from above, and then the .html file. Put both up on a web-server and then click on the install link to install...

Moving Tabs

Drag a tab from one window to the tab pane of another.

Multiple Profiles

  • start firefox from cmdline with "firefox -P" to get to the Profile Manager, or
  • enter "about:profiles" in an open firefox session

Building Firefox

Build instructions are available at: Build Instructions. Other options (for Debian and Ubuntu) would be to download and build the source package.

Building on Vivid, using Mercurial

The "bootstrap.py" program expects the user running it to have sudo access, which I don't. So I run the apt-get as a user with sudo:

sudo apt-get install autoconf2.13 build-essential ccache python-dev python-pip python-setuptools unzip uuid zip
sudo apt-get install mercurial
sudo apt-get install python-docutils
sudo apt-get install libgtk-3-dev libgconf2-dev yasm libasound2-dev libpulse-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev 

The version of mercurial packaged in Ubuntu Vivid is old, so build a new one:

cd ~/build
hg clone https://selenic.com/repo/hg
cd hg
hg up 3.5.2
make install PREFIX=$HOME
# rehash - if using tcsh, which I am
vi ~/.hgrc # set it up
hg debuginstall

Get Firefox:

cd ~/build
hg clone https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/ firefox
cd firefox

Test the mercurial setup:

./mach mercurial-setup

Set up a basic mozconfig:

# Bob's Firefox Mozconfig - from:
# https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Configuring_Build_Options
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/obj-firefox
ac_add_options --enable-application=browser

Start the build:

./mach build

External links