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ConfigFox: manage advanced Firefox privacy and security settings

ConfigFox is a new program for Windows that you can utilize to make advanced privacy and security changes to the Firefox web browser based on our security and privacy list.

The program uses our privacy and security settings list for Firefox as its basis and takes it up to the next level.

If you have checked our list before you know that it comes as a user.js file that you need to place in Firefox's profile folder to apply it to the browser. That's great if you want all of the entries added to Firefox, or if you spend time going through the file one by one to remove settings you did not want to change.

ConfigFox provides you with options to select settings you want to add to a Firefox profile giving you more flexibility and other options that make it a must-have tool for Firefox users.

configfox

ConfigFox is a portable program that you can run from any location. Please note that it is only available for Windows currently.

The program detects the default Firefox profile automatically and can load that for you, or, and that is another option, you may use the File menu to select another profile on the system. That's great news for portable versions of Firefox and secondary profiles.

All settings are sorted into groups such as startup, privacy, cache or JavaScript & Dom. A click on an entry displays descriptions of settings, and another click on those the actual preference that Firefox uses to control the behavior.

For instance, if you click on Privacy, you get the "disable heartbeat" description. A click on it reveals that it is controlled by the preference browser.selfsupport.url, and a click on it that it is Mozilla's user rating telemetry system.

configfox preferences

The preferences are configured automatically, but you may override those from within ConfigFox if the need arises.

You may select all preferences of a group or individual preferences. There is a search that you may use to find preferences faster, and basic information about the selected profile at the bottom which you may find useful as well.

The search finds only the first matching entry in the preferences list. If there is one thing that could be better, it is this as the program should highlight them all.

The search finds all matches but highlights only the first. You can use PageUp and PageDown to navigate between search results.

Once you have made the selection you can save it to the user.js file that ConfigFox placed in the linked profile directory.

All config options are commented out by default, and only those that you have selected in the program are enabled by removing the comment tags from their lines.

A restart of Firefox applies those changes to the browser's configuration. It is recommended to test these to make sure they work fine. You may restore the default at any time though from the ConfigFox interface by deselecting preferences.

That's not all what ConfigFox offers though. You may add your own configuration entries to the program. The program is based on Firefox's current privacy and security settings but has a couple of extra preferences added to it which you find under tweaks.

You may add those as groups and individual entries either from within the graphical user interface or by editing the default.js file in the program's root folder directly.

Other options include searching online for the selected preference, to create a new Firefox profile, and to use tools to vacuum SQLite databases, to defrag the profile folder, and to backup the user profile.

Last but not least, you can use File > get latest configuration to check for preference updates and get those merged with the current version of the configuration tree. New entries are highlighted by ConfigFox automatically so that you know what is new and may require attention.

Verdict

ConfigFox is an excellent program that makes it comfortable to edit Firefox advanced preferences. Instead of having to edit these entries manually in a user.js file, you can use the interface of the program to do that. This is an excellent tool for the Firefox browser.

 

 

This article was first seen on ComTek's "TekBits" Technology News

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