The Tin Hat
A Lighter-weight Firefox

A Lighter-weight Firefox

Category: else
A 2 Minute Read



If you had asked me a year ago how I configured my browser I’d feed you a list of about ten add-ons. Over the last few weeks however I’ve significantly trimmed Firefox down of unnecessary and/or redundant add-ons. Yes, I’ve reduced my security somewhat, however navigating websites is now far less painful as well. I also consider every unnecessary block of code that I can remove to be worthwhile.

Here’s what my browser looks like now.

###Add-ons

  1. HTTPS-Everywhere
  2. NoScript
  3. uBlock (with some of the extra lists enabled)

Yeah, that’s it. Three lightweight add-ons. Since reducing my add-on list Firefox’s memory footprint has shrunk considerably. However, there’s some stuff I’ve got going on under the hood as well in about:config

###about:config

  1. network.http.sendSecureXSiteReferrer = false
    • Disable referrer headers
  2. media.peerconnection.enabled = false
    • Disables WebRTC, which can leak your IP if you’re behind a VPN
  3. media.peerconnection.turn.disable = true
    • Double disable WebRTC
  4. privacy.trackingprotection.enabled = true
    • This is Mozilla’s new built in tracking protection. May be somewhat redundant with uBlock’s lists, but it’s worth enabling.
  5. geo.enabled = false
    • Disables geolocation

There’s also a huge list of other tweaks you can make in this Reddit post, but these are the privacy relevant ones that I’ve changed.

Of course, I’ve also done the easy stuff in the settings menu, such as rejecting third party cookies and deleting stored information after closing Firefox, but this is the meat of it all.

What sort of setup are you running? Or have I missed anything major? Leave a comment down below.

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