foxglove 0.1.6

Firefox proxy profile manager

Foxglove - a Firefox profile manager

Foxglove is a Firefox wrapper with two purposes:

1. Programatically generate Firefox profiles with preferences that I consider desirable for the majority of use cases. These disable, where possible, Firefox's built-in advertising, pop-ups, telemetry, experiments, and similar features. Generated profiles are stored in ~/.foxglove.

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

usage: foxglove [-h] [--config path] [--chrome path] [--content path] [--options string] [-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. If this option is given, foxglove will attempt to use ssh(1) to connect to the host and configure Firefox to use
                    it as a SOCKS proxy

optional arguments:
  -h, --help        show this help message and exit
  --config path     path to a specific ssh config file to use
  --chrome path     path to a userChrome.css file to add to the Firefox profile
  --content path    path to a userContent.css file to add to the Firefox profile
  --options string  additional options to pass to Firefox. Space-separated options should be entered as a single (e.g., double-quoted) argument. (--no-
                    remote, --new-instance, and --profile <path> will be automatically prepended)
  -d                dry run (don't launch Firefox).
  -e                ephemeral profile (delete on exit)
  -a [add-on]       download and install add-on with this name. May be used multiple times

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, foxglove first appends /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS to PATH. Prepending a 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

All foxglove data including profiles is stored in ~/.foxglove, which will be created on first run. Foxglove will not touch your regular Firefox profiles in any way.

Preferences

These settings have changed substantially during Firefox's development, so some may be unsupported or meaningless in current versions.

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:

Key	Default	Foxglove	Comments
dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled	true	false	May break some sites
privacy.resistFingerprinting	false	false	May break some sites; can be counterproductive
privacy.donottrackheader.enabled	false	true	May be used for fingerprinting
network.trr.mode	0	0	TRRs can interfere with test environments

Related projects

• Firefox Profilemaker