The Ghostery Desktop Browser is a minimal fork of Firefox optimised for privacy. The main extra features are:
- The Ghostery Privacy Blocker extension is included and enabled by default.
- Ghostery privacy search included.
- Firefox settings (telemetry etc) tuned for maximum privacy.
The Ghostery browser is available for the following platforms:
We also offer a nightly build for testing development builds. To get them:
- Install the standard release build from one of the links above.
- Open the browser and navigate to
about:config
. - Search for the pref
app.update.channel
and change the value tonightly
.
To build the browser we first need to download a copy of Firefox and patch it with our
customisations. This process is handled via fern.js
, which is our tool to handle the patch
workflow. Set up your local workspace as follows:
git clone https://github.com/ghostery/user-agent-desktop.git
cd user-agent-desktop
npm ci # Fern.js dependencies
./fern.js use # Pull the correct Firefox and Ghostery extension sources
./fern.js import-patches # Apply patches to Firefox
Once you have Firefox source, you'll have to set up your environment to build the browser. Detailed instructions are available for Firefox, but in most cases the following will suffice:
cd mozilla-release
./mach bootstrap
Once your build toolchains are setup you can build using the Ghostery mozconfig
file:
cd mozilla-release
MOZCONFIG=/path/to/user-agent-desktop/brands/ghostery/mozconfig ./mach build # start build
./mach run # to launch the browser
The local build setup will build the browser for your current platform. To build for other platforms
we provide dockerised builds. These can be run using the fern.js build
command:
./fern.js build -t mac
Windows and Mac builds depend on platform frameworks being included. These should be placed in the
build
directory:
- Mac:
MacOSX14.0.sdk.tar.xz
. This can be found inside an XCode install. - Windows:
vs.tar.zstd
andMakecab.exe
. See the end of this document to where to find these.
After cloning the repository,
run the following commands to get started (Note that you will need npm
and
node
to be installed on your system):
./fern.js use # Setup 'mozilla-release' folder using information from '.workspace'
./fern.js import-patches
cd mozilla-release # Do some stuff... and commit your changes
./fern.js export-patches # Check 'patches' folder
Bumping the Ghostery extension bundled with the browser requires the following:
./fern.js use --ghostery v8.5.2
./fern.js reset
./fern.js import-patches
Whenever a new version is released or if you want to hack on top of another Firefox version, run the following:
./fern.js use --firefox 80.0.1
./fern.js reset # Needed if you already had this version locally.
./fern.js import-patches
Building the browser in any flavor can be achived as follows:
# Prepare 'mozilla-release' folder with correct version and patches.
./fern.js use
./fern.js reset
./fern.js import-patches
# All three commands can be used from Linux and MacOS (except windows cross-build).
./fern.js build --target mac
./fern.js build --target linux
./fern.js build --target windows
Then check the content of the mozilla-release
folder to find the artefacts.
./mach bootstrap
requires a VC checkout of the gecko source to run properly. Use the gecko-dev repo to run mach bootstrap
and setup your local build environment:
git clone https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev.git
cd gecko-dev
./mach bootstrap
Now you should be able use ./mach build
in this project.
Alternatively, the build-*
scripts in this repo will prepare docker images with a prepared build environment for each platform. The scripts will drop you to a command prompt in a docker container where you can run ./mach build
directly.
This can be built on windows after setting up a build environment as per these instructions.
You will need to install the Windows 10 SDK at version 14.29.30133
. Then run the following to create vs2019_14.29.30133.tar.bz2
:
OUTPUT_DIR=PATH_TO_TEMP_FOLDER
./mach python --virtualenv build taskcluster/scripts/misc/get_vs.py ./build/vs/vs2019.yaml $OUTPUT_DIR
tar --zstd -cvjSf vs2019_14.29.30133.bz2 -C $OUTPUT_DIR .
This is copied from a windows install at C:\Windows\System32\makecab.exe
.
The User Agent projects aim to serve people's interests. We are open for communities to actively shape the future of our browsers and seek to get community feedback and opinions.
Communities are taking an active role in the project decision making:
- Better-Fox - maintain an opinionated Firefox preferences list
If you are interested in joining User Agent Community feel free to start the discussion at Github or join our Matrix chat community.