bemused by the asymmetry in the browser’s Settings page, he turns to Kagi in search of answers, and finds this page, where a community member says:
Firefox 41 no longer uses the browser.newtab.url setting in about:config because it was constantly attacked by malware. Starting in Firefox 41, you need an add-on to change the new tab page.
2025-06-05 unsatisfied with the subpar UX, he decides that he must create a browser extension himself.
2025-06-05 so he turns to Mozilla’s official documentation, and conjures up his first ever
manifest.json…{ "manifest_version": 2, "name": "riki's new tab", "version": "1.0", "description": "riki.moe's new tab page!", "icons": { "48": "icon-48.png", "96": "icon-96.png" }, "chrome_url_overrides": { "newtab": "index.html" }, "chrome_settings_overrides": { "homepage": "index.html" } }2025-06-05
so, as suggested by another guide, he zips up the extension’s files and goes to Firefox’s Extensions to install it permanently.
2025-06-05 dismayed, he decides it is time to sign the Deal with the Devil. he will cryptographically sign his addon.
2025-06-05 but… that requires a Firefox account. and an API token from that account. that you pass in via a command line parameter, because fuck security, I guess.
2025-06-05 (imagine going through all that security charade, only to find out the official toolkit for web extensions requires passing sensitive credentials in an insecure way… ain’t that fun! good thing
fish --privateexists, but huge kudos to all the other processes on my system that may have readweb-ext’s command line arguments while it was mincing away at Doing the Signature.)2025-06-05
