Introduction

Firefox is a very good web browser with a good history of being privacy friendly. However, nowadays the browser can be a bit lacking in that department. Fortunately it is a relatively easy process to make it a lot more secure and private. In this guide I will be detailing the steps you can take to make Firefox very private. It will range from installing extensions, to configuring multiple profiles, to installing custom user.js files and i2p. I hope that this guide will make the process simple and easy to understand.

Arkenfox user.js

The Arkenfox user.js is a well maintained privacy configured user.js file for Firefox. A user.js file is used to configure firefox in a more in-depth fashion than the settings can offer. The Arkenfox user.js install is quite a simple process, and the only maintence required is ocassionaly running the update script that it provides. On top of reading this article, it is A NECESSITY THAT YOU READ THE ARKENFOX WIKI. It is an incredibly in-depth user.js and YOU MUST READ ABOUT IT TO BE SURE YOU DON'T JACK SOMETHING UP. I will write the remainder of this assuming that you are also reading the wiki, so if you aren't the rest will probably be quite confusing.

The first step is to download the actual file. The above link will take you to the official github page. On the right where it says releases, click on the latest version. Scroll down until it says assets, and download the zip file. You will want to create a new profile, which you can do by going to about:profiles and clicking create a new profile. Once you have done that, it will list the location of said profile, you will want to open up that location and copy over the arkenfox zip file to it. You will then unzip it, and take all of the files outside of the folder it creates and put it DIRECTLY INTO THE PROFILE DIRECTORY. You do not want it so that it is "profile-path that varies from system to system/arkefox/import arkenfox files". The files need to be directly under the directory of your profile.

You can then create your user-overrides.js and run the update script that is appropriate for your platform. Then run the prefs-cleaner script that is appropriate for your platform. After you have done this you can run Firefox, and select your arkenfox profile. Congratulations, you have officially installed a custom user.js! We will now move on to some good extensions, which are actually very very few for a few security reasons.

Extensions

Now, because of the arkenfox user.js, there are actually very few extensions that we SHOULD install. Extensions are something that should be kept to a minimum. The only extension that you really need is uBlock origin. This is a very fast and effective content blocker, that is highly, highly, customizable. This guide will not cover the usage of uBlock origin, but expect a seperate one soon. The only other extension I would recommend is dark reader, just because it can be quite nice on the eyes, and doesn't compromise your security that badly. If you don't mind light mode, or like it, than you can do without this one.

Closing Remarks

Great, you have hardened firefox and have a pretty secure and private browser. You can now browse the web with decent privacy. Some important things I should mention are that this is not the most secure sollution there is. If you need to, use the TOR browser. Also, you can increase the security of Firefox with i2p, but that seemed a little out of scope for a starting guide. This is the setup I use for daily browsing, and casual web use. This is not what I would use if I needed some real deal security. I have, or will have, articles on more robust sollutions to web browsing, but it mostly boils down to using TOR, or i2p. This ending part will probably seem a little redundant, but I really need to hammer home the point that this should be for casual web use, and that in the grand scheme of things this isn't that secure. It is just about as secure as Firefox can get, but it is still Firefox. Anyway, happy browsing!