Arkenfox-softening VS user.js

There is a project of mine where I tried to script the changes, but its currently a mess and I dont think it works. Should take care of everything, downloading the file, applying the changes, and also creating the fitting profile and launching it.

I made a script (currently linux only but for native, snap and flatpak) to change a few settings and make it usable again.

What do you mean by "lightweight"? You can use SimpleMenuWizard to reduce context menu entries, you can use Arkenfox or my adapted version to remove Pocket, Telemetry e.g. and make it a perfect privacy browser.

Look at this script, it automates the Download of Arkenfox user.js and applying of a few settings making it more user friendly while not really limiting usability.

But using Firefox with the Arkenfox hardening (custom script I made, changing some minor usability settings and handling updates), it was reeally slow.

You can download my changes here, and Arkenfox here. What you do is, open your profiles folder (visible in about:profiles, link it somewhere where you can easily find it!) And copy the user.js in it (Firefox has to be closed during that). Take my additions and copy paste them to the top of the script. Now there will be double lines, search for them (Kwrite etc. support that) and deactivate the original line with //.

I use Firefox with the Arkenfox settings (you can change them to be less annoying) and this as the standard search engine

Re: firefox and privacy, if you want to use firefox for privacy, consider using https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js . There is a case to be made that Firefox (with arkenfox's user.js) is one of the best privacy-respecting but still fairly usable browsers.

For extensions, I recommend people follow the recommendations[1] in the arkenfox repo and either harden their firefox or use librewolf. Umatrix is unmaintained since 2019.

[1] https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions

For macOS : Thunderbird and you can harden it even more with this : https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

only arkenfox

This article is shit. https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/ is what you want.

If you make time to dig through settings and change them away from their official use (99% of users don't), then you should use a customized setup (in this case, a user.js). That way, you're good to go no matter what Firefox fork you use.

> Firefox remains a stable option to come back to everytime

Don't get me wrong, I've been using Firefox for the last decade and I don't intend on using anything else for the foreseeable future, but Mozilla has no idea what they're doing with Firefox nowadays. Firefox View is the most useless thing I've ever seen, that expiring "independent voices" theme picker was some weird hippie stunt[1], the latest UI redesign which split the tab from the window looks hideous, and it's not like Firefox doesn't have things you can tweak for a more private experience[2]. I miss Firefox Test Pilot where they tried out different new features, I found a lot of them to be very useful but sadly lots of them didn't make it.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/in...

[2] https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/

Like others have said you can customize the browser to the point that it doesn't even look like the default anymore. Or customize it to maximize privacy.