foxglove

Foxglove is a Firefox wrapper with two purposes:

1. Programmatically generate Firefox profiles with preferences that disable, where possible, Firefox's built-in advertising, pop-ups, telemetry, experiments, and similar features. Generated profiles are stored in ~/.foxglove/profiles.

2. Optionally ssh to a remote host and configure the Firefox profile to use that connection as a SOCKS proxy.

Installation

Requires Python 3.10+.

pip install foxglove

Usage

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; foxglove will connect via ssh(1) and
                  configure Firefox to use it as a SOCKS proxy

options:
  -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 an add-on from addons.mozilla.org;
                  repeatable

Add-ons (-a) — The value for -a is the URL slug after /firefox/addon/ on the Mozilla Add-ons page; for example, https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/ → -a ublock-origin. You can pass -a multiple times to install several extensions.

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

Development

Requires uv.

uv sync

# Lint
uv run ruff check .

# Format
uv run ruff format .

# Test
uv run pytest

Preferences

Foxglove preferences target Firefox 135+ and are cross-referenced with arkenfox user.js. See prefs.js for the full list.

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:

Related projects

• Firefox Profilemaker