I’m all about minimalist, functional setups. My firefox startpage had been super minimal for years, to a fault. I wanted to add some utilities but could never find a balance with the existing extensions or even using custom userChrome.css.
I recently came across a setup doing rounds on r/firefox and just knew this was the one.
Basically, how it worked was you installed an extension that let’s you pick a url you could point to for new tab pages. You point this url to a page like this.
This page then let’s you customise various aspects, like your own bookmarks, search engine and themes. This config data is then persisted to your local storage so it’s in a way customised for you.
Now, as amazing as the setup is, I did not want my search requests or visits to my bookmarked sites to go through an externally-hosted page. Luckily, the whole thing is open-source. So, I decided to fork it and host it on my personal website.
Small hiccup. The original setup was built using vanilla js. My website is built using Astro. So, with Claude’s help I ported it over to Astro over a Sunday morning, stripped off extra features that I didn’t need, like keybindings, since I already use Vimium. I decided if I want to customise it I’d make changes to my website repo and deploy it, since the whole thing hardly takes a minute to deploy.
That’s it. Now I have a super simple setup that I love.
Here
PS: I plan to put up the ported astro setup on my github soon.