The following procedure was tested with Firefox 120.0.1 (64-bit) on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS running the default Gnome desktop.
For Ubuntu Desktop I use the Mozilla Team PPA (add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/ppa) to install Firefox.
After installation, I usually make the following changes in the browser's Settings:
- Make Firefox the default browser
- Import Browser Data: bookmarks only (usually from an HTML bookmarks backup)
- Replace your existing user.js with that from "Betterfox" [1]
- Website appearance: Dark
- Home: set a custom URL as the homepage, set new tabs to Blank Page
- Firefox Home Content: uncheck all
- Search: set Default Search Engine to DuckDuckGo
- Privacy and Security: Web Advertising Preferences - uncheck (not yet in BetterFox) [2]
- Privacy and Security: DNS over HTTPS - If desktop at home, turn Off to use system DNS resolver(s), if a laptop set to "Default Protection"
- Sync: set up sync for bookmarks only and turn on
- Themes: Dark
- Install extensions: uBlock Origin, Bitwarden
[1] "Betterfox" provides a consistent approach to improving Firefox privacy and performance via a customized user.js file. Yokoffing. Betterfox [Software]. GitHub, https://github.com/yokoffing/Betterfox.
[2] This potential Trojan horse feature, dubbed Privacy-Preserving Attribution, was added in Firefox 128. It is supposed to be disabled in the next release of BetterFox. I went ahead and added the code to disable to my own user.js in the interim. See https://gladtech.social/@cuchaz/112775302929069283 and yokoffing/Betterfox#305. Find Mozilla's justification for enabling it here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution. As my old Contracts professor would ask, "Persuaded?".