Self-hosted Firefox

check this out… a containerized Firefox that you can self host and run in a browser!

Why? to navigate from your server wherever you are:

• Bypass local filters/censorship
• Browse websites like you do from home
• Levergae your home ad-block setup
• Keep your browsing history totally private and secure

You will be able to acces your own firefox instance via any other web browser. Inside, it uses a VNC server/client, but toward outside it's just a plain webpage with firefox inside.

This is one of those use cases where a container is the perfect choice. The stack needed to achieve all this is not trivial and would be potentially not a good idea to set it up server-wide on your home server.

Now, if you plan to use firefox with multiple users you will need to replicate this setup for every user as you will need to spin up a separate container for each one. I will assume that user is the user you want your firefox to run as.

As user create the /home/user/docker-compose.yml file:

docker-compose.yml

version: '3'
services:
  firefox:
    image: jlesage/firefox
    environments:
     - USER_ID=1000
     - GROUP_ID=1000
    ports:
      - "5800:5800"
    volumes:
      - "/home/user/firefox:/config:rw"

Adapt your port (5800) and the USER_ID and GROUP_ID for user. You also need to specify a config folder, wihch must be existing and writable by user.

Then the usual:

su - user
podman compose pull

Create the following NGINX config:

firefox.conf

location /firefox/ {
        rewrite ^/firefox/(.*) /$1 break;
        proxy_ignore_client_abort on;
        proxy_pass   http://127.0.0.1:5800;
        proxy_redirect  http://127.0.0.1:5800 /firefox;
        proxy_cookie_path / /firefox/;
    }

See The Reverse Proxy concept for more info.

To start it, and set it up on boot, as usual follow my indications Using Containers on Gentoo, so link the user-containers init script:

ln -s /etc/init.d/user-containers /etc/init.d/user-containers.firefox

and create the following config file:

/etc/conf.d/user-containers.firefox

USER=user
DESCRIPTION="Firefox in a box"

Add the service to the default runlevel and start it now:

rc-update add user-containers.firefox default
rc-service user-containers.firefox start

Of course, you will want to adapt for multiple users, maybe.