Since the previous post in this series, mobile-config-firefox has seen not one, but two releases:

In part, this due to me not noticing prior to the first release that the breakage I had observed with Firefox Nightly would come and hit with the Firefox 137 release.

Avoiding a broken experience with Firefox 137

Here's what I wrote:

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](- https://whattrainisitnow.com/release/?version=esr)), so a follow-up MR will have to happen.

At that point I had not realized, that having a Debian distrobox with Mozilla's repo also made installing the beta possible, and I think I had also not realized, that trying the beta is way more interesting than Nightly, as what's in beta, will make it to the very next release.

I was a bit shocked when I realized that after running make && make FIREFOX_DIR=/usr/lib/firefox-beta install in my Debian distrobox, beta looked just as broken as nightly had in my brief stint with nightly.

The entire userChrome was at the top of the window, tab-width was very where small, applying "mcf.addressbarontop" and similar had no effect - what had happened?

Well, two things:

The first was easy to figure out, some random web search landed me on this reddit thread. I just had to go through the busywork and adjust all media queries with -moz-bool-pref and add the new way with -moz-pref right below, and these would work again.

That worked nicely. After this first change, tab-width was still broken. I connected my Laptops Firefox Nightly (Nightly, as I had that installed on the laptop) with the one on the phone, picked a tab as element to inspect and looked what was going on. I was prepared that this could be annoying and take a bit, but fortunately I quickly noticed that there was a (new to me) variable called --tab-min-width-pref. I added a --tab-min-width-pref line after every --tab-min-width line, deployed the hastlily changed configuration, and, luckily: Problem solved.

Minutes later, the MR was filed. Fortunately, two more merge requests could be landed with 4.6.0, so it was not just a "Peter missed ignored this important upcoming breakage" release.

A follow-up to the URL bar fix

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.

Previous to submitting Fixing urlbar popout on current Firefox (!75) I had played with a solution I liked better on current, but that could not be submitted at the time, as it broke ESR - the URL bar would move to the right when activated.

Just today I found a way to fix this: Gating the customizations so they won't be applied on ESR 128 (and, actually, until 132 - but we fortunately don't need to care about no longer supported interim releases). It still needs more testing - help welcome!

How to help test this?

You need to have git and `make installed.

First clone my fork and checkout the branch feature/wider-url-bar:

git clone https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/1peter10/mobile-config-firefox.git
git checkout feature/wider-url-bar

Then build it:

make

And install it:

sudo make install

for current Firefox.

To test with ESR, Beta, Nightly or Librewolf respectively run:

sudo make FIREFOX_DIR=/usr/lib/firefox-esr install 
sudo make FIREFOX_DIR=/usr/lib/firefox-beta install 
sudo make FIREFOX_DIR=/usr/lib/firefox-nightly install
sudo make FIREFOX_DIR=/usr/lib/librewolf install

Note that all these install methods only work for native distribution packages, not flatpak/snap etc.

The commit is also merged into my 'next' branch, so if you like breakage, try that one out ;-)

Other things to tackle

Here's a brief list of things that I want to look into before Firefox 140 is out:

  • check for (and remove) leftovers from the pre ESR 128 days,
  • land non-glitchy popups (needs a fix for installing extensions and potentially other broken popups I have not come across yet),
  • hide "Browser Layout - Show sidebar" option (or make the sidebar work somewhat on mobile,
  • make extension popups scrollable again (e.g. for uBlock Origin),
  • change media queries (meaning, upstream Emma's media query tweaks) so that landscape usage feels more similar (meaning: URL bar stays on the bottom unless mcf.addressbarontop is set to true) - see #37).
  • adding an option to hide container indicators (see !66
  • improve the README: better display of mcf.* options, link related projects/forks, help installing the config.

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!