On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 06:02:02PM +0100, Mick wrote > Taking this a step further I create additional one-off profile > directories in /tmp, which are deleted when I reboot (this is a > laptop), which ensures that tracing between sites does not happen.
Here is more detail on my approach... 1) Generate a random 8-letter name for a directory with the command head /dev/urandom | tr -d -c a-z | tail -c 8 Let's say you got "cjyqsiqd" (without the quotes). 2) mkdir ~/.mozilla/firefox/cjyqsiqd (or whatever 8-character string you got) 3) Create directories for a template profile, plus the profiles you want to use. I'll call them "profile1", "profile2", etc, but in real life, you'll want more descriptive names. mkdir ~/.mozilla/firefox/cjyqsiqd/template mkdir ~/.mozilla/firefox/cjyqsiqd/profile1 mkdir ~/.mozilla/firefox/cjyqsiqd/profile2 mkdir ~/.mozilla/firefox/cjyqsiqd/profile3 ... mkdir ~/.mozilla/firefox/cjyqsiqd/profilen 4) Create the profiles starting with the template profile. Note that there is a good reason for navigating into the profile dirs. It will become obvious later. The command is... firefox -new-instance -ProfileManager Create Profile Next Enter new profile name: (more intuitive if it matches the directory name) Choose Folder (Navigate into the corresponding folder before clicking Open) Open Exit Rinse lather repeat for all the other profiles you'll want. 5) For the next step do not delete the template dir, but delete all the other profile dirs you've just created. No, this is not a joke. cd ~/.mozilla/firefox/cjyqsiqd/ rm -rf profile1 profile2 profile3 ... profilen 6) Launch firefox with the template profile... firefox -new-instance -P template ...and tweak it to your heart's content, keeping in mind what options your profiles will need. Install extensions, set font sizes, your favourite behaviours, tweak the menu bars, set cookie options, etc. And make sure to set the browser to open to a home page (more on that later). When you're finished, exit Firefox. 7) Copy your template directory to replace the profile directories you deleted in step 5. This is a lot easier than doing the same changes in several directories. The names will be different depending on what did in step 3. cd ~/.mozilla/firefox/cjyqsiqd/ cp -r template profile1 cp -r template profile2 cp -r template profile3 ... cp -r template profilen 8) Open the profiles and do the final customizations for each profile separately. The command is firefox -new-instance -P profilename The customizing includes stuff like which cookie domain(s) to accept and which page(s) to open on startup. And yes, you can get Firefox to open multiple tabs on startup. When entering the homepage to open, separate the pages with pipe signs " | ", e.g... http://foo.com | http://bar.com | ftp://bad.example.com/data.txt > Note, you will also need to remove any flash cookies (LSOs) which > sit in your ~/ and are not deleted, unless you have installed the > Better Privacy addon. For a more pedestrian approach: > > rm -Rf .macromedia/Flash_Player/* There also seems to be ~/.adobe directory. What I do is to create *FILES* (yes) like so... touch ~/.adobe touch ~/.macromedia This blocks the creation of directories by that name. Some idiot sites will refuse to play videos in that situation. I click on the Flash button, and the video displays something like "Error #2046". I have a workaround for that, namely a script ~/bin/killflash like so... #!/bin/bash rm -rf ~/.adobe rm -rf ~/.macromedia sleep 20 rm -rf ~/.adobe touch ~/.adobe rm -rf ~/.macromedia touch ~/.macromedia I launch killflash in an xterm, and then click on the video to play. Note that the video only has to start within the 20-second window. The way that linux works, you can delete a file, but any app that has it open will continue to see it, even though no other apps can. As soon as the last filehandle to the file is closed, its space is finally released. -- Walter Dnes <waltd...@waltdnes.org> I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications
