Before I started contributing to mobile-config-firefox, I always believed that, aside from bigger, code-named UI redesigns, Firefox's UI code would not change much at all.

These days I know better. Due to these changes, mobile-config-firefox does currently not work all that well with (current) Firefox 136, and I am reviving this little series, to keep me motivated, to hopefully attract contributors and to document the process.1

A late discovery

But let's start with something completely different. When playing with a FuriLabs FLX1 at FOSDEM, I noticed that they ship a very nicely customized Firefox. The code can be found at

They have done a really great job. Aside from incorporating the Firefox GNOME Theme, they have (through lots of hard work) managed to made popups not glitchy.

I recommend you giving it a try. It's currently optimized for Firefox 135 and generally targeting current. This means, working with Firefox 136, you will have to apply the fix suggested in ESMification of mobile-config-firefox (#100) to src/mobile-config-autoconfig.js. Also, if you are on postmarketOS/Alpine, you will need to install coreutils in order to install the configuration successfully.

But 136 is not all gloom and doom - popups can now be scrolled without using the scrollbar. So if you have tons of tabs open (or tons of extensions installed), your experience with 136 is substantially better - thanks Mozilla!

What I am trying to tackle

In the past weeks, I have been working on the following things:

Fixing tab-width on FF 133+

With this pending Merge Request tabmenu.css: rework tab width for FF 133+ (!74). The element with the id #tabmenu was removed with Firefox 133, hence this change was necessary. At first I went for a different solution which can be found in my experiment/tab-width-and-firefox-view branch.

Unfortunately, since playing with Firefox Nightly (using the Debian package in a distrobox), I know that this fix won't last until 140 (the next ESR), so a follow-up MR will have to happen.

Also support for different values of browser.uidensity should behas been added on March 24, but is not part of the current MR yet.

The disappearing URL bar issue

Another gift Mozilla gave us is a disappearing URL bar. I have managed to come up with a pending Merge Request: Fixing urlbar popout on current Firefox (!75)

This is not the fix I want, but it's the one I could deliver now. See the linked MR above for why I am not super happy with this.

Better, non-glitchy popup handling

Of course, I aim to cherry-pick commits to bring the better popup handling from furios-firefox-tweaks to mobile-config-firefox. This is a major change, that will touch many userChrome customizations. You can see my progress on this in my feature/better-popups-from-furios branch, which is still a work-in-progress.

The main issue (among others), is the current state significantly worsens the behavior of some "popupnotifcations". It basically, as is makes installing extensions impossible. FuriLabs are fixing these with JavaScript, I am still hopeful to find a CSS-based solution.

That said, as is, it already fixes a few issues, which may seem unrelated:

The stuff I've decided not to introduce

  • experiment/findbar: It keeps the feature set, but makes the find bar (you know, Ctrl + f) eat less precious screen space. Unfortunately, it also impacts translations and may be harder to understand, which is why I have decided to not look into this further.
  • experiment/tab-width-and-firefox-view: This is an alternate fix for the tab-width issue, that does things differently. It colors the tab-bar to indicate private mode (via two different variables), adds an option to use Firefox View and introduces a userContent modification to make about:firefoxview work. Here, I just don't want to introduce the maintenance burden.

(I was going to put a "to do list/stuff I am thinking about"-section into this post, but it is already too long. Maybe the next post will have room for this.)

Want to get involved?

If you are interested in making Firefox work better on #LinuxMobile devices, make sure to take a look at the open issues!

If you need help getting in touch, feel free to reach out - via the issue tracker, so that we can improve the README, or just to me via email. It may take me a bit to get back to you, but I will definitely try to do so ASAP.

Thank you for reading this!

1

I have also decided to stop contributing once Firefox ESR 140 is out (and works well with m-c-f – it's better to stop before it's not fun anymore, and I feel that I may be reaching that point sooner than I was hoping for.