Firefox: user.js to tighten security

I finally manned up to tackle the ghacks (now arkenfox on github) user.js for Firefox.
I felt that if I want to continue using Firefox I really have to do this, since it's making more and more unbidden connections. Thankfully it is possible to disable most.

It's a lot of work to customise - you can't just drop it into your FF profile - so I read their wiki for tips to make it slightly easier with overrides and some helper scripts.

I wanted to go through the file myself, to figure out which settings I want and which I don't want.

Previous attempts have shown me that this really does drop pointless connections and also gives a huge performance boost, but also breaks some features that I find very important, as well as websites.

There is one setting that is like a master switch to enable a whole bunch of fingerprinting-related security settings: privacy.resistFingerprinting. I decided to set that to false and go through the other privacy.resistFingerprinting.* options one by one. I think I have a good compromise now - Firefox is my comfort browser for online forum sessions etc., a comfortable interface that's easy on the eyes is important. And I also still use an addon to block javascript on most sites. For those other, suspicious sites I already made it a habit to launch the Tor Browser Bundle instead.

So I put together my own user-overrides.js and learned how to half automate the process. Learning, preparing, reading the user.js with 1678 lines, making decisions what to use for my override and finally writing some small scripts to watch out for updates - it all took the better part of a day.

A first try - I seem to have done well. Everything I need is still working so far. Performance has increased manifold! So snappy, so fast! But I accidentally deleted my browsing history (probably a year's worth), so that might also play into it.