# foxglove
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] [--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. 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
--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 this add-on. Use the name as it appears in the Mozilla add-ons site URL. 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, 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:
```bash
PATH="/Applications/Firefox Nightly.app/Contents/MacOS:$PATH" foxglove example
```
## 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](https://github.com/allo-/firefox-profilemaker)
