this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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About:config saving in account settings (apollo.town)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Is there a add-on or something to store my about:config settings in cloud so when i distrohop i dont have to set it manually?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Put the changes in a user.js file in your Firefox profile directory (the same one that probably already has prefs.js and logins.js).

Use this format (same as about:config):

user_pref("dom.security.https_only_mode", true);
user_pref("ui.systemUsesDarkTheme", 1);

Then sync or backup the whole directory, excluding the "cache" subdirectories to save space.

(Pet peeve: Firefox, please use $HOME/.cache/ like every other app!)

You might try losing everything but the .json and .sqlite files. Have not checked, but that is probably enough. Only missing paths are regenerated when you launch Firefox.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

(Pet peeve: Firefox, please use $HOME/.cache/ like every other app!)

set browser.cache.disk.parent_directory to /home/<user>/.cache/firefox

note: if you use flatpak you might need to allow access to this directory

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks. This spurred some research and I decided to disable the disk cache entirely instead:

user_pref("browser.cache.disk.enable", false);
user_pref("browser.cache.disk.smart_size.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.cache.disk_cache_ssl", false);
user_pref("browser.cache.offline.enable", false);
user_pref("browser.cache.memory.enable", true):
user_pref("browser.cache.memory.capacity", 512000);

Seems an easy way to avoid the SSD churn and syncing issues, since today's fast internet connections make disk caching less useful. That may be wrong but so far it seems as fast as ever.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

just to complete this line of though, one could also use a ramdisk as the cache directory, that should have the same effect as the prefs.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Interesting, yes. By which you mean fiddling with /etc/fstab to mount a tmpfs partition and pointing the cache directory at that ? Any pros and cons you know about?

Anyway, after a bit of browsing I really cannot detect any performance difference since disabling caching. So seems a good deal so far. I wish Firefox had a simple on-off switch instead of needing a bunch of config tweaks to do this.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

By which you mean fiddling with /etc/fstab to mount a tmpfs partition and pointing the cache directory at that?

on linux, yes

Any pros and cons you know about?

  1. those who already have a ramdisk it might be pretty easy to use it and just change one preference
  2. the ramdisk will remain until reboot so you can close your browser and you still retain the cache (might be useful depending on peoples workflow and sites they visit)

I wish Firefox had a simple on-off switch instead of needing a bunch of config tweaks to do this.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks, useful tips.

Sounds like a good idea to propose on https://connect.mozilla.org

Done. 24 hours ago but still awaiting moderation! I didn't know about this forum. Unfortunately they are obviously snowed under by feature requests, many of them unmerged duplicates. So not expecting much, alas.