Firefox in Mint 19.2 Cinnamon

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Experimenting with above OS.  Still using with USB stick.  In Windows, I use a userchrome.css file to increase the size of the fonts and menu bars so I can read them.  I am trying to find out where in the Mint system files I can put a copy of this file.  Thanks

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In Mint, it should be in

~/.mozilla/firefox/profilename/chrome

where profilename is replaced with the name of your user profile.  You will have to enable showing of hidden files in Nemo (“Files”) to see .mozilla.

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I was able to find the Chrome folder in my profile.  Inside was a Fonts folder.  I was unable to copy either the .css or the text from it into the Chrome folder.  I tried using both the right click and the ctrl+ methods.

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>Still using with USB stick….

perhaps you’re trying to modify read-only filesystem on thumb drive.

May need to install before customizing

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Yes, still using flash drive so your response may be true, thanks for that.  I just wanted to make sure I could set up my preferences before committing to an install and new partitions were created in my Windows drive.

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I am not really sure what you are trying to do. Are you trying to copy the contents of your Windows chrome folder to the live USB session to test it out, or have you installed Linux to the USB drive?  Are you copying directly from the Windows volumes from the Linux session, or are you doing so by way of a thumb drive or something similar?

When you say it didn’t work, what exactly did it tell you?

It sounds as if it is a permissions issue, but the devil will be in the details.

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/16GB & GTX1660ti, KDE Neon
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, KDE Neon (and Win 11 for maintenance)

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I have Mint 19.2 installed on a thumb drive which I boot into.  I am trying to see if I can do all of my Firefox customization before I decide to install it to my hard drive.  My userchrome file makes the fonts and menu bar larger so I can read it.  I am visually impaired, so this is very important to me and might be a deal breaker.  With Mint open, I went into the computer/file system and found the Chrome folder in the Firefox profile.  I could then open the OS drive and try to copy/paste the contents of the same folder of my Windows Firefox profile.  I tried both the .css file itself and also the text in the .css file.  Both times the paste option of the right click menu was grayed out and did not work.  Also ctrlC and ctrlV did not work.

I can try to create a text file in the Chrome folder and then do the editing afterwards, might work.

Yes it sounds like a permissions thing to me, but I find it hard to believe that the file on the USB drive would be write protected , but not so when the distro is installed on the hard drive.

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Larry B wrote:

Yes it sounds like a permissions thing to me, but I find it hard to believe that the file on the USB drive would be write protected , but not so when the distro is installed on the hard drive.

It’s very possible that problems that happen with USB drives won’t happen with hard drives or SSDs.  USB drives are a whole different animal, with different kinds of issues and capabilities.

Still, there are some things to try.

Mint comes with a disk utility that is simply called “Disks” in the menu.  If you load that and select your USB drive from the list in the left pane, then make sure the volume containing your /home folder is selected, it should not say “Read only” under partition type, and the Contents field will hopefully say Ext4.  Please submit a screenshot if you are not sure what you are looking for.  (Just press PrintScreen and it should ask you where you want to save the screenshot.)

If that checks out, you can navigate to the ~/.mozilla/firefox/{profilename} folder in Nemo (called “Files” by Mint), put the Nemo view mode into List view if it is not already, then right-click the header bar (the bit that says Name, Size, Type, etc. above the actual file listings) and check “Owner,” and verify that the owner of the chrome folder is you (your username, whatever you chose to make it).

I am pretty confident your userChrome.css modifications will work in Linux as you want them to.  Firefox is meant to be cross-platform, and .css itself is platform-agnostic.  There are some edge cases where things work a little differently, but for the most part, it’s all the same on any (desktop) platform.  When I moved from Windows to Linux, I copied the entire profile over, not just the chrome directory (I did have a decent-sized userChrome.css file at the time)  and I am still using evolutions of that profile in Linux years later (in Waterfox and Firefox proper). I just removed any entries in prefs.js that contained Windows file URLs, and the rest just worked.

In addition, as I am sure you know, you can set the Mint system fonts to be larger, and it will affect Firefox’s menus and UI in addition to other applications and the OS itself.

I really hope that Mozilla doesn’t remove the userChrome.css ability from Firefox.  It’s the last thing keeping Firefox viable for me… without that, I wouldn’t even bother having it on my PC.   I have a nasty suspicion that they will, as they have with so many other useful things in the past decade.

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/16GB & GTX1660ti, KDE Neon
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, KDE Neon (and Win 11 for maintenance)

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Thanks all for the help, I may try to install to the HD soon.

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