How I use Firefox 01 Dec 2013

Recently I got fed up with Google Chrome and wanted to try Mozilla Firefox after I heard a lot of good improvements from it (memory leaks fixed, shumway).

I want to see if Mozilla Fireofx is as convenient as Chrome. Additionally I want to improve my privacy.

Improve Privacy: Always Private Browsing

A great feature of Firefox is that doesn’t need to save your history. Essentially you’re always surfing in Incognito Mode. This feature can be enabled in Preferences, Privacy

Password Manager

I need to reenter all my passwords when I use private browsing. I therefore use an external Password Safe which stores all my passwords and allows me to enter them fast into a website.

Block Advertising

I installed Adblock Plus.

Warning: This is a commerical plugin that tries to replace advertising with its own. This can be disabled in the preferences. If this will annoy me I will update this post. There are also some forks without this behaviour.

Block Tracking

I also use disconnect, which disables tracking services. This plugin is also available for Google Chrome.

Reduce Browser Fingerprint

Then I checked Panopticlick from the EFF to see the uniqnes of my browser. It appeared to be unique in the dataset. The bigges identifier have been the Browser Plugins. With the Mavericks Update there appeared a Default Browser Helper Plugin.

I deactivated both Plugins (Default Browser Helper and Quicktime), lets see how this will play out.

After removing the plugins one in 17.87 browser had my config. The next biggest part was the User Agent

I used the User Agent Switcher Plugin from Chris Pederick and added an empty user agent. I installed UAControl. This plugin can set the default User Agent to an empty one. For web apps that require a specified browser I can enter domain specific user agents. As of now I added a User Agent for Asana and one for Facebook. The User Agents I use are Mozilla/5.0 Chrome/32 and Mozilla/5.0 Gecko Firefox

This reduced the Panoptic Score from 1 in 5000 to 1 in 60.

After I used only the en_us locale in my HTTP_ACCEPT Headers I reduced my fingerprint to 1 in 1.8 million users

Fixing Zooming while holding the Command Key

Another thing that bothered me was the zooming when Cmd was hold and I tried to scroll. To disable this set the mousewheel.with_meta.action to 0. This info is from the Mozilla Forum

Some additional information about Browser Fingerprints and Privacy How to modify your browser’s fingerprint so that it is no longer unique Smart Referrer Plugin Browsing Safely With Firefox Fingerprinting by Mozilla

Flash

The only remaining problem is Flash. Most of the time I don’t need it, but sometimes I want to watch a flash only video.

Shumway landed in Firefox Nightly. However I couldn’t manage to make it work with youtube. I tried an article from mozilla, but it couldn’t help me.

I added another Plugin for HTML5 Youtube to Firefox which helps with some videos

Sometimes I have to switch back to Chrome to watch a Flash Video