firefox profiles for ad-hoc privilege separation

Just a quick write-up, since few people seem to actually be doing this.

Firefox supports profiles: each profile is a distinct configuration under ~/.mozilla/firefox, with its own extensions, themes, bookmarks, history, and cookies. This means that badly-behaved web pages in one profile will not be able to read the data from another profile (unless they actually own your system, which is beyond the scope of this simple technique). It also means you can have as many GMail accounts as you like without having to sign out and wipe cookis every time.

To create non-default profiles, open the profile manager from the command line:

bash# firefox --no-remote -P

Create as many profiles as you like. There can be one for each online persona, one for email, one for paying bills, one for pr0n, whatever. For this discussion, we will assume the profile test was created.


For each profile, do the following:

1. Create a desktop file for the profile in ~/.local/share/applications . Make sure the .desktop filename is unique.

  bash# cp /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/firefox-test.desktop

2. Add a distinct icon for the profile in ~/.local/share/icons . You can get different icons by doing a Google image search for firefox icon. There are plenty.

  bash# cp ~/downloads/firefox-green.png ~/.local/share/icons/firefox-test.png

3. Edit the .desktop file to ensure that the Name and Icon are unique, and that the Exec line references the new profile:

Name=Mozilla Firefox (testing)
Exec=firefox --no-remote -P test
Icon=firefox-test.png

That's all there is to it. A new icon for Firefox (testing) will appear in your favorite window manager. Add whatever extensions you deem fit for the purpose.

more ffox plugins

These are more for the UI folk:

Colorzilla:Look up a pixel's color value

Unicode lookup/converter : Character lookup utility

MeasureIt : Ruler widget for measuring distance in pixels

Smart Search

By far the most useful plugin I've added to Firefox in the past half-year or so:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/188

SmartSearch adds a context menu item that allows you to send selected text (or whatever word you right-clicked on) to any one of the links in the Bookmarks 'Quick Searches' folder (Bookmarks->Organize Bookmarks->Bookmarks Menu->Quick Searches). I had to create this folder myself, because at some point I short-sightedly deleted it as being useless.

The SmartSearch page on quicksearches has a number of handy links such as a dictionary, thesaurus, IMDB, amazon, netcraft, whois, wayback archive, and google maps. I added a few more for google images and some source code pages:

Google Images Quicksearch
Google Code Quicksearch
Koders Quicksearch
Krugle Code Quicksearch (requires JS)
Codease SmartQuery
Codease FullText Query

Obviously many more can come in handy, and the code search engines can be trimmed down to just one or two (probably Koders and Codease).

The good news is that new Quicksearches are simple to create: navigate to the search page, right-click on the search form, select 'Add a keyword for this search', invent some useful keyword, and use the Quick Searches folder for the 'Create in' location.

Nightly Tester Tools

Got sick of the Intel driver crashing X11, and Ubuntu releasing their upgraded packages only on the recent version (Horny Heron or something). Bit the bullet, did the upgrade, and...

...Firefox 3beta got installed! What the hell?!? Poof go all (well, most) of my extensions, you know those handy things I use for, oh, locking down Firefox, anonymous browsing, other small conveniences that make using such a poorly-performing browser worthwhile.

Included in these was Zotero, in which I have quite a number of documents stored for offline viewing, and which *still* has no independent UI for accessing them (even the Open Office plugin requires a running instance of Firefox). Suckfest à la mode, just what I ordered!

A search of the Zotero forums, though, turns up a link to the Nightly Tester Tools plugin, which can be used to run an extension for a previous version of Firefox. Zotero is now up and running on Firefox 3beta.

Version 3 does seem to be a bit faster than 2, and hasn't been too crashy. The theme/extension writers should really get their act together and update/port their stuff before this puppy hits the street.

Pulseaudio, Firefox, Flash 9

Upgrading to the latest flash plugin (9) kills audio in Firefox. Awesome!

Based on the PulseAudio information on http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup
and the library provided by revolutionlinux, it took only a couple of steps to get things working:

cd /usr/src
git-clone http://git.0pointer.de/repos/libflashsupport.git
cd libflashsupport
sudo ./bootstrap.sh
sudo ./configure --prefix=/usr
sudo make
sudo make install

Then restart firefox.

It probably helps to have /etc/firefox/firefoxrc contain the line

FIREFOX_DSP="padsp"

...and to have /etc/asound.conf contain the lines

pcm.!default {
type pulse
}

ctl.!default {
type pulse
}

pcm.pulse {
type pulse
}

ctl.pulse {
type pulse
}

...but libflashsupport is the magic bit.

Another decent firefox plugin

SQLite Manager

It is what it says.

Firefox Addons

You think you only run a handful of extensions until you stop and check:

Adblock Plus : Absolutely required; should be built-in.

Aging Tabs : Colors tabs according to age. Might remove this one.

All-in-One Sidebar : For the Opera enthusiast. It's a bit much, and might be removed, but it does look pretty useful.

Anonymization Toolbar : Goodies for the paranoid.

Clipmarks : Select portions of a web page to print, save, or stash online. Sounds great, but it's surprising how rarely one uses this.

Console^2 : Advanced Javascript debugging console.

Controle de Scripts : Fine-grained control over Javascript permissions.

CustomizeGoogle : Control all sorts of stuff that "do no evil" Google does behind your back.

del.icio.us Bookmarks : Yeh, del.icio.us is annoyingly web 2.0 and lifehackery-smug, but it's still useful for sharing bookmarks across multiple machines.

Dictionary Search : Select text and look it up in a dictionary (opens in a new tab). Up two four dictionaries can be configured: very nice.

Distrust : A paranoid mode for Firefox; when exiting Distrust Mode, all history, cache, and cookies collected since turning on Distrust Mode are deleted.

DownThemAll : Download manager for repetitious tasks like saving all the images or videos in a page.

Extended Cookie Manager : Status bar icon for allowing/preventing cookies from a site.

Extended Statusbar : Status bar text that shows why a page is taking so long to load.

Fasterfox : Modifies ffox to make it behave more aggressively and load pages faster.

Firebug : Turns ffox into a debugger for web development.

Flashblock : Another required add-on: replaces Flash applets with a play button, so they do not start automatically.

Flat Bookmark Editing : More from the "why didn't Mozilla think of this" dept: this modified the Bookmark Manager so you can edit bookmark properties without having to open a separate dialog.

Grab and Drag : Replaces the cursor with an Acrobat Reader-style hand so web pages can be "grabbed" and scrolled like PDFs.

iDND : Required anti-spoofing add-on that shows an icon on the statusbar which is either green (traditional domain name) or blue (international and potentially-spoofed domain name).

iMacros : Automate web tasks with macros. Haven't played with this enough yet to recommend it whole-heartedly.

Image Zoom : Straightforward; allows you to zoom images.

JSView : View the source of all Javascript being executed by the page, even when the Javascript is in external files.

Load Time Analyzer : A simple toolbar for measuring the performance of your web pages.

Map+ : Context menu item that looks up selected text (presumably an address) on Yahoo Maps.

NoScript : Absolutely required! Allows you to control the Javascript permissions on a per-page basis. Disable JS for all sites by default, then use the NoScript statusbar icon to enable JS for specific domains (either temporarily or permanently) as you go.

PopupMaster : Statusbar icon for managing popup windows. Who really likes popups, anyways?

ShowIP : Shows the IP address of the current page on the statusbar, with options for doing a whois lookup and so forth.

TabScope : Shows a mini-preview of tabs on mouseover, with navigation (forward, back, refresh, close) buttons. Can slow down navigation if you have many old (i.e. cached to disk) tabs open.

TamperData : Very useful Sidebar window for viewing and modifying CGI parametersand HTTP headers.

Torbutton : Statusbar icon to toggle Tor for the paranoid. Requires tor and iproxy to be installed.

Torrent Finder Toolbar : If you like torrents (of course no-one does), you'll love this.

TrackMeNot : A curious tool for the paranoid that attempts to fight search engine profiling by generating random search requests from your browser. Incorrect settings will slow down your browsing.

URL Link : Context menu item that opens selected text (presumably a URL) in a new tab. Good for plaintext files and websites who forgot to wrap their links in A tags.

UrlParams : Similar to TamperData. This shows the CGI parameters (GET and POST) for the current page in the sidebar, while TamperData is used to set parameters for pages you are about to surf to. Run them side-by-side to see the difference.

View Source Chart : Displays the HTML source of a web page in easy-to-read 'chart' form. Has to be seen to be believed.

Web Developer : The most useful add-on for dealing with annoying sites or developing web pages. Provides a toolbar with menus for manipulating web page images, stylesheets, cookies and forms, as well as for viewing details of the underlying HTML. Highly recommended.

Zotero : Tool for academics, though it is useful for anyone doing online research. Provides a catalogue for saving and annotating (instead of just bookmarking) web pages, emails, files, etc.

Obviously this selection will be overkill for most people (how many paranoid developers with a research background are out there, anyways?). If for nothing else, install all of these to really test how poorly ffox can be made to run on your system.