Firefox, the Latest and Greatest

The Firefox package from sid, along with the postmarketOS patches and hardware acceleration enabled, provides an excellent, useable browsing experience.

As of version 79, hardware acceleration appears to be stable, resulting in (relatively) smooth rendering and scrolling.

Installation of Firefox from sid:
  • Run sudo apt update && sudo apt install firefox
  • scale-to-fit firefox false
  • Launch Firefox once to initialize a new profile (needed for the pmOS patches)

A Debian package for mobile-config-firefox is in the works. When that is released, the following steps will be replaced by a simple sudo apt install mobile-config-firefox Users have reported various degrees of success with installing the pmOS patches, but this is what worked for me for the time being:

Installation of pmOS tweaks:
  • Run cd && git clone https://gitlab.com/josh_canoe/mobile-config-firefox.git && cd mobile-config-firefox
  • Run make
  • Run sudo make install
  • Run sh src/mobile-config-firefox.sh
  • Exit Firefox and start as usual.

The caveat of using this method is that the handful of files installed are not tracked by any package manager and will have to be deleted manually if you want to uninstall the patches. Also, the mobile-config-firefox.sh script needs to be run every time you create a new profile.

Enable hardware acceleration
  • Go to about:config
  • Set layers.acceleration.force-enabled to true
  • Restart Firefox
Firefox User Interface Tweaks

In the mobile-config-firefox there is no easy way change the density of the interface

  • Go to about:config
  • Change browser.uidensity to 2

The top bar of Firefox should become a bit thicker and be more touch friendly