FIREFOX

Firefox is a powerful web browser, but it lags behind on some of the latest features. Michael Reed explores how to add them.

Credit: www.mozilla.org

OUR EXPERT

Michael Reed considers Firefox both an underrated Clint Eastwood movie and great web browser.

Firefox is one of the best browsers around. It’s hardly surprising that it’s a solid, reliable application as it’s 20 years old this year, with a legacy that stretches back to even earlier browsers, such as Netscape. If we were to make a criticism of Firefox, though, it would be that it’s a bit conservative compared to some of the competition. Ticking off the features, browsers such as Brave and Opera and even Chrome have gotten ahead of Firefox when it comes to modern, useful innovations.

So, that’s what we’re going to do – we’re going to add the cream of those more modern features to Firefox. What we’re focusing on is genuinely useful add-ons that improve usability and security. We’re going to add things such as VPN and AI support right into the browser, and we want to improve the user interface to make it more efficient and enjoyable to use. We’ll assume that you’re used to another browser or are coming back to Firefox after some time away.

OPTIONAL FIREFOX FEATURES

1 Import info

Your bookmarks, logins and passwords are the first things you need to import.

2 Sidebar

Firefox has a sidebar, and you can add a lot of functions to it.

3 Scrollbars

We prefer to have the scrollbars permanently visible on the screen, and a decent, grabbable size.

4 Artificial intelligence

We love having an AI chatbot available in the sidebar, along with other artificial-intelligence features.

5 Security and privacy

Ad blocking, a VPN and enhanced privacy can all be added via extensions.

6 Customisations

Customise the toolbar and other aspects of the user interface.

Set Firefox alight

The first stage to switching over to Firefox is to get it installed. Fortunately, as it’s fully open source, it’s available for practically every Linux distribution, and there are many potential methods of installation. The usual game of chasing the latest version numbers isn’t as important when installing Firefox, because it has its own internal update mechanism. As a result, Flatpak, Snap or even your distro’s package manager should work equally well. It’s common to find that Firefox was installed by default by your distro, and that’s fine, too.

Once you have Firefox installed, if you want to run it as a standalone browser, you can. But you’re missing out if you don’t create a free Mozilla account. As soon as you’ve set up the account, things like bookmarks and passwords are synchronised between all of your computers using Firefox, and this extends to the Firefox mobile phone app, too. This also enables a useful feature as you can send tabs to other devices that are signed in to a Mozilla account, even if they are not currently running, and this includes the mobile app version of Firefox. To do this, simply right-click on a tab and select the Send Tab To Device submenu.