DragonFly BSD

UsingFirefox

Installation

As of the writing of this document, Firefox is in dports as www/firefox.

Binary package

As root:

# pkg install firefox

Building from source

A Dports checkout/tarball is needed for this, usually you can get it easily by following the instructions in /usr/Makefile:

# cd /usr
# make help

To install:

# cd /usr/dports/www/firefox
# make BATCH=yes install clean

You can also use synth to install it:

# cd ~
# synth install www/firefox

Configuration

Always check what the pkg-message of the package says. It will give some recommendations for the setup.

# pkg info -D firefox

For Firefox specifically bear in mind that IPC in FreeBSD works differently as it works in DragonFly BSD.

Security

Besides the usual recommendations for web browsing security, we've created also a way of setting up Chromium to minimize the risks of exposure to certain vulnerabilities (Spectre, Meltdown) among other things. Please see: RunSecureBrowser Similar guidelines could be applied to any other browser although they may not have the same security mechanisms Chromium has.

Known issues

Please list down all the problems there might be with this browser below.

BugURL Description Workaround Status
None Slow page rendering and/or slow typing in web pages' textboxes. In about:config set browser.tabs.remote.autostart=false Unresolved
None Random crashes, SIGILL, SIGSEGV. No debug symbols possible in the binary yet None Unresolved
None Compressed pages are not rendered properly (binary displayed as text) In about:config, empty network.http.accept-encoding and network.http.accept-encoding.secure variables Unresolved