privacy/firefox/README.md

README

Make using the web more safe by disabling commonly used techniques and mechanism without sacrificing usability.

Why Firefox? It provides high configurability, is open source and thus better to be reviewed by external security advisories.

Mainly based on arkenfox with some custom overrides.

An alternative is LibreWolf which comes with a lot of settings by default.

• README
  • Install
  • Custom overrides
  • Recommended extensions
    • Must have
      • uBlock settings
    • Advanced, but highly recommended extensions / software to use
  • Recommended search engines
  • Additional hints

Install

To find your profile folder, click on the menu top right, on Help -> Troubleshooting Information. You can directly open your Profile Directory from there or see it, typically it's something like $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/... or in Windows %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\...

• Install arkenfox (copy to your Firefox profile)
• Copy user-overrides.js also into your Firefox profile folder
  • Change any setting if needed, e.g. not clean history?
• Apply the user-overrides.js by running ./updater.sh or the .bat file on Windows in the Firefox profile folder
• Remove unnecessary search engines and apply your own or use DuckDuckGo/Startpage
• Install recommended extensions/plugins
• Import provides settings file for uBlock and Canvas Blocker
• Customize toolbar
  • add home button
  • remove separator spaces
• Disallow saving logins and use a password manager, e.g. KeePassXC
• Login to Firefox sync

Custom overrides

Look into user-overrides.js which custom overrides are enabled and maybe adapt to your needs. In general they're applied to ease browsing without sacrificing too much security or are just preferences, e.g. scroll speed.

Recommended extensions

Besides Firefox's integrated anti-tracking mechanisms, it's still advised to install additional plugins to further enhance this.

In addition, some of those extensions will also greatly improve your user experience: fewer ads, faster page loads. Remember, you can also switch them off (disable), you don't need to uninstall.

Highly recommended to have all of them allowed in Incognito Mode as well.

See arkenfox extensions recommendations.

Must have

• uBlock Origin: blocks ads and unwanted trackers, also removes certain url parameters (https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/)

Hint: Extensions impacting redirects or cookies might lead to malfunctioning of some websites. If you encounter this, it's recommended to disable them per page and NOT globally! First could shot can be setting an exception for a page inside uBlock.!

You can hide extension icons in the overflow menu if you like. Just right click the icon in the top right in the menu bar and "pin to overflow".

uBlock settings

• Import the ublock.txt in the "My Filter" menu for proper settings from the extension_settings/ folder within the extension.
• Import https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gwarser/filter-lists/master/lan-block.txt in "Filter lists" (Custom)

Advanced, but highly recommended extensions / software to use

Use a password manager and don't store or synchronize your passwords within internal browser functionality, e.g., KeePassXC or Bitwarden with a custom provider

Recommended search engines

If not possible in another way, you can add them via Add custom search engine. Just follow instructions after installing and opening the extension.

For most search engines, you can also store your preferences inside the URL itself. This is great for having the same experience across devices and if you clear any cookies when your browser shuts down. Make sure that you have those preferences in when you save as a new search engine.

You should also prefer POST over GET. Depending if there's a %s in the URL, it's using GET. If it's not present in the examples below, make sure to hit the Advanced settings when adding it as search engine and check POST. Then provide q={searchTerms} in the input field.

https://searx.be
https://duckduckgo.com
https://www.qwant.com
https://duckduckgo.com

Be sure to add shortcuts to be used in your navigation bar, e.g. @ddg refers to DuckDuckGo search engine and directly issues searches to DuckDuckGo from the navigation bar and does not use the default search engine, but your default!

Additional hints

Besides securing Firefox, you should consider not using the DNS servers of your Internet provider and instead install system-wide DNS alternatives or a local DNS server which directly queries root DNS servers. There's really no downside of this.