firefox-bare-ui.md

UI-less Firefox

This is a short guide on how to set up a Firefox profile with no UI (no tabs, no address-bar, no bookmarks, etc.). Note that it is written for and only tested on Arch Linux. You'll probably need to perform different steps on Windows.

1. Create a new Firefox profile
   1. Run this shell command:

      firefox --no-remote --profilemanager

   2. In the Firefox - Choose User Profile-dialog, click Create Profile...
   3. In the Create Profile Wizard-dialog, click Next
   4. Type bare-ui as the profile name
   5. Click Finish
2. Launch the profile
   1. In the Firefox - Choose User Profile-dialog, select the newly created bare-ui profile
   2. Un-select the Work offline and Use the selected profile without asking at startup options
   3. Click Start Firefox
   4. Complete the standard first-run experience
3. Go to about:config and apply the following settings:

   Key	Type	Value
   toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets	Boolean	true
   browser.tabs.inTitlebar	Number	0

4. Go to about:support and look for a column named Profile Directory and click the Open Directory butten next to it
5. Close Firefox
6. Create a new sub-directory called chrome and open it
7. Create a new file called userChrome.css and paste the following CSS-code into it:

#nav-bar, #TabsToolbar, #PersonalToolbar, #toolbar-menubar {
    visibility: collapse !important;
}

#sidebar-header {
    display: none !important;
}

After this, you should be able to start a UI-less Firefox instance by simply running this shell command:

firefox --no-remote -P 'bare-ui' 'https://example.com'

A final note: You can call the profile anything you want, just replace any occurance of bare-ui in this document with your desired profile name.