Firefox Impermanence

[kylebartz]

Struggled to get firefox to be properly setup with Impermanence. Have ran into the following issues:

• Persisting extension settings (somewhat solveable by manually assigning extension UUIDs)
• Extensions would not auto enable by default, even with scope properly configured
• Firefox unwilling to show browser history due to "files being accessed by another program" (my guess is something to do with either file permissions and/or how preservation hardlinks the files)

In addition to all of the above, should solve this problem with Firefox v147 which adds XDG support (.config/mozilla instead of .mozilla for all of its storage)

Some examples & prior art I have found online of folks trying to solve Firefox impermanence

• How to keep Firefox extensions enabled with home-manager + impermance nix-community/home-manager#6398
• https://gitlab.com/maximilian_dietrich/nixos/-/blob/2b67863132f4bd8fa11d41809f53930c95127f76/modules/graphical/apps/browser/default.nix
• Firefox extensions still losing their data to impermanence BryceBeagle/nixos-config#151
• https://github.com/WylieYYYY/nixos/blob/749d04263c2af1c54f829602dc27b35edc6156e8/user/browser.nix#L138

[kylebartz]

From my testing, this appeared to be a consistent solution to persisting extension data; however, for whatever reason it wasn't playing nice with disabled scope and auto enabling the extensions: https://github.com/unleashurgeek/nix-config/blob/e2747564c61432a027b464d0e629bc26b25ccab1/modules/browser/_extensions.nix