Firefox: provide opinionated postmarketOS configuration

added discussion type::feature labels

I think parts of this would be good to upstream to Alpine, maybe everything even? I doubt they have issues with disabling telemetry or Firefox pocket. Even switching the default search engine and setting a blank page would probably be ok for them.

CC @Cogitri as the upstream Firefox maintainer

By Bart Ribbers on 2020-07-07T16:09:43

Hm, to be honest I think I'd rather not change the defaults of FF, especially since all of this is rather easy to do yourself:

The gift icon only pops up after updates (I think? At least I don't notice it often) and is easy to disable (has a little thingie to disable it forever at the bottom of the dialog)
At least I happen to use Pocket :)
Set blank homepage -> easy to do yourself via settings, so I'd rather not deviate from the default here
Set a privacy friendly search engine -> DDG can be chosen in "This time, search with..." and settings already and IMHO its search results don't get anywhere near to the quality Google provides (but of course Google comes with the tradeoff of using your data, so IMHO users should decide this)
I don't think we should install addons for the user, especially since they have quite a lot of privileges within the browser (although I do trust the maintainers of uBlock Origin to do the right thing).

Disabling telemetry by default sounds fine to me though, I doubt telemetry from a distro as non-mainstream as Alpine is useful anyway :)

By Rasmus Thomsen on 2020-07-07T16:09:43

One thing that is a problem with current firefox defaults though, it doesn't fit onto the screen in Phosh in portrait mode. That is in part due to the many UI elements I think. It would be nice if at least this one major caveat could be addressed with the default settings, in whatever way.

By Ellie on 2020-07-07T16:12:13

@PureTryOut wrote:

I think parts of this would be good to upstream to Alpine, maybe everything even? I doubt they have issues with disabling telemetry or Firefox pocket. Even switching the default search engine and setting a blank page would probably be ok for them.

Well, if somebody wants this, we could make a firefox configuration package. But I'm not even sure what would be a good name for it. We can't upstream it as "postmarketOS config for firefox". And since @Cogitri as maintainer of the firefox package doesn't seem to like to pre-configure it, we should better keep it in postmarketOS (at least initially, maybe opinion changes down the road).

Pre-installing an adblocker is quite the opinionated change, and I don't think that this would fit how Alpine does things.

@Cogitri wrote:

[...] especially since all of this is rather easy to do yourself:

I'm not sure if you are talking about Alpine or postmarketOS. In Alpine it is definitively easy to change this yourself. However, on phones it is a different story.

It takes longer to change all these settings, installing add-ons in particular.
With current firefox versions it appears to be impossible to use the settings dialog on phones (screenshot from @okias with the Librem 5 resolution from an upstream report).
postmarketOS targets a different userbase. As pmOS becomes more stable, we slowly shift from just developers to also making it usable by casual users. Casual users may not even know what an adblocker is, or that there are all these settings. Especially the adblocker will make sure, that the user does not need to deal with advertising that eats their traffic, cpu, battery and is tracking them. I think this is vital in giving the user power of their own device.
Phones are less powerful than PCs (especially phones that are a few years old). They can really use the resources that bloated javascript advertising scripts are sucking out of the browser.

The gift icon only pops up after updates (I think? At least I don't notice it often) and is easy to disable (has a little thingie to disable it forever at the bottom of the dialog)

As seen in the screenshot, it appears on the first start of Firefox. In any case, it wastes precious screen space and distracts the user with a notification from doing the task they intended to do when they opened the browser. I consider this an anti-feature.

At least I happen to use Pocket :)

I get that it is useful. But I don't like how the pocket button is supposed to be always visible (at least on desktop), even if you did not sign in into your pocket account.

Furthermore, this is a cloud service that does not seem to use end-to-end encryption (no results). What are they doing with the user's data? Where is the source code of the server component? Why should we (postmarketOS developers) put this in front of our users?

Set blank homepage -> easy to do yourself via settings, so I'd rather not deviate from the default here

See point about broken settings on mobile. To elaborate why I don't like the default homepage (and also new tab page as I just found):

it shows "snippets" from mozilla
it shows links to "popular" websites like Facebook, which do not act in the interest of our users
(showing the most recently visited websites also seems like an anti-pattern to me. when I open the browser, I have a task in mind and want to surf to a specific website, not get shown a bunch of websites that I could visit instead. But we could argue about that...)

Set a privacy friendly search engine -> DDG can be chosen in "This time, search with..." and settings already and IMHO its search results don't get anywhere near to the quality Google provides (but of course Google comes with the tradeoff of using your data, so IMHO users should decide this)

In my personal experience of using DDG for years, the search results are good enough. And if I'm not satisfied with them, I type !g at the end of my query and get redirected to google results.

I don't think we should install addons for the user, especially since they have quite a lot of privileges within the browser (although I do trust the maintainers of uBlock Origin to do the right thing).

See adblocking arguments above.

Thanks for your feedback @Cogitri!

It's interesting to see that you have a different opinion on most things. I'll think some more about this, maybe it is feasible to display a one-page configuration assistant in postmarketOS, when you start firefox for the first time, which would allow you to quickly set all these settings and install the adblocker. With privacy-focused defaults (i.e. what I described in the inital post), so when a casual user just hit the big OK button at the bottom, they will get those. A power user could then change the search engine to google, if they prefer, disable the adblocker etc.

By Oliver Smith on 2020-07-07T21:07:56

@ell1e wrote:

One thing that is a problem with current firefox defaults though, it doesn't fit onto the screen in Phosh in portrait mode. That is in part due to the many UI elements I think. It would be nice if at least this one major caveat could be addressed with the default settings, in whatever way.

Should be fixed by !1396 (merged) (at least the main browser view, the settings probably still don't work as written above).

By Oliver Smith on 2020-07-07T21:09:11

If things as important as the settings window are unusable on mobile, why are we considering shipping Firefox by default at all?

Even with scaling fixes and some opinionated config, I still think we should ship a proper mobile browser rather than a desktop one forced into some shoddy resized mobile mode, and preferably the one that comes with the DE's. I do get the points you mentioned previously about security, but I really don't think the current Firefox will ever become a good experience on mobile. In my opinion we wait with shipping it till Mozilla provides a proper mobile UI for it, not before.

Especially because most of the things you want to disable as mentioned in the OP are things that aren't even present in alternatives like Epiphany and Angelfish in the first place.

By Bart Ribbers on 2020-07-08T15:24:58

The problem with Epiphany is that webkit2gtk is currently rather crashy on musl due to not setting a correct stack size, so Epiphany isn't a great experience right now. Upstream has a patch for for that for the new webkit2gtk version, which should be out by mid September, but the patch doesn't apply to the current version (maybe pmOS could try using the unstable version?)

By Rasmus Thomsen on 2020-07-08T15:31:58

@Cogitri would make more sense to find some snapshot of current development webkit2gtk, which in general will work better than actual unpatched version?

By David Heidelberg on 2020-07-08T15:43:21

That's what I meant with the unstable version :)

By Rasmus Thomsen on 2020-07-08T15:50:08

changed the description

By Oliver Smith on 2020-07-07T20:05:34

added 1 deleted label

Many of the annoyance fixes needed for firefox are done as build time patches in gnuicecat. We could reuse some of that work. Eg, https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnuzilla.git/commit/?id=23e37864f1864244d67386c13948c016f0453e33

By silver on 2020-07-19T18:07:15

mentioned in merge request !1445 (closed)

By Oliver Smith on 2020-07-24T02:03:24

closed

Firefox: provide opinionated postmarketOS configuration

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