bending firefox to my will

for when you want to shake things up

so i've been using the newfangled Arc Browser on my work laptop and been enjoying it, but since my personal computer is windows, i can't use it everywhere (they're expecting a windows port in Nov or so, which to me means "2024" at least).

ever since, i've been trying to distill the things i like about Arc (which isn't everything), and see if i can replicate things somewhat in Firefox.

turns out, my main things are a) sidebar tabs and b) bookmarks as tabs (i.e. a bookmark looks like a tab, mostly so i don't keep opening the same site in multiple tabs)

Firefox ended up being much more extensible than i thought! there are definitely extensions that add tabs to the side, using the built-in sidebar (i'm using Tab Center Reborn). but then i found out about userChrome.css

with userChrome.css, i can style the browser like its a webpage. there's even a set of tools like the Inspector that let me live-edit the goddamn browser. this feels like power i should not have and will not be responsible with. (instructions on how to do that)

anyways, i stole a setup from reddit and have collapsing side tabs now, with no tabs on top of the window.

i still need to figure out how i can do "bookmarks-as-tabs," which isn't even something i think i'm explaining right, never mind know how to find without a standard name for it.

edit: lmao turns out there's a limit to how much data an extension can store (particularly data that can be sync'd between computers) and i have too much css for it to save.

i really don't want to have to minify the css but i may have to.

this was originally on cohost