Boring-Fox is primarily developed with JavaScript and CSS. It offers a sophisticated and convenient start page for users who are just a tad bit boring. The theme provides easy access to bookmarks, weather widgets, unit and currency conversion within a cohesive interface using tabs.

Features

Tab based bookmarks

To add your bookmarks, open scripts/tabs.js and edit the links as required. The bookmarks are formatted in json format in the file for easy modification.

Weather Information

To set this up make an account with openweathermap and paste your API key in the scripts/temp.js file.

Useful Tools

To set up currency conversion make an account with exchangerate-api and paste your API key in the scripts/conv.js file.

Configuration

The theme can be configured and customized by editing the scripts/tabs.js, scripts/temp.js, scripts/conv.js files. It is pretty self explanatory but it allows you to update/add the following:

1. tabs.js: Add and customize bookmarks.
2. temp.js: API key and location information.
3. conv.js: API key and add/change currencies (use ISO 4217 currency codes).

Instructions

The below step-by-step guide is divided into three parts: modifying the new tab and homepage, userChrome.css mods, and colors. If you want the same look as the screenshots, follow all three; otherwise, you can choose to use your own colors or skip the userChrome.css mods as needed.

Custom Firefox Styling (userChrome.css mods)

1. On the Firefox url bar, enter about:config and set toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets to true to enable CSS customization.

2. Enter about:profiles on the url bar and open the root directory under deafult-release to go to your profile folder

3. Copy chrome/ and boring-fox/ from this repo into the profile folder.

Custom homepage/startpage (as newtab too)

1. Find your Firefox directory corresponding to your operation system:

• Linux: output of whereis firefox
• Windows: C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox
• MacOS: /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS

1. Under default/prefs create or update autoconfig.js and paste in the code below:

   //
   pref("general.config.filename", "autoconfig.cfg");
   pref("general.config.obscure_value", 0);
   pref("general.config.sandbox_enabled", false); 

2. Navigate two directories back to the Firefox directory and create autoconfig.cfg and paste in the code below. Make sure to pass the path of the boring-fox/index.html file into newTabURL (it should look something like this: file:///<path_to_firefox_dir>/boring-fox/index.html):

   //  
   var {classes:Cc,interfaces:Ci,utils:Cu} = Components;  
   
   try {  
   ChromeUtils.defineESModuleGetters(this, {
     AboutNewTab: "resource:///modules/AboutNewTab.sys.mjs",
   });  
   var newTabURL = "file:///PATH_TO_YOUR_INDEX.html"; // Add the path to your index.html file here
   AboutNewTab.newTabURL = newTabURL;  
   } catch(e){Cu.reportError(e);} // report errors in the Browser Console  

3. Change homepage under Firefox settings to 'Custom URLs' and paste in the same path (to the index.html) as step 2.

4. Restart Firefox.

Colors

1. Download the Firefox Color add-on. To use the default colors of the theme, click here to add them to Firefox. You can also customize the colors to your liking.

Fonts

The font files are already present in the theme. If you want to manually incorporate the required fonts into the theme, download Minecraftia, Fira Mono, and Montserrat, then rename the font variables accordingly. Alternatively, you can choose any font by modifying the variables located at the top of the style.css file.

ASCII Art

All ASCII art, except for the graph found on the currency converter tab, is not created by me. Please find the sources for them below:

• Retro Car
  Source: asciiart.website (#5 on the page)

• Cat on Moon
  Source: textArt.sh (#16 on the page)

• Book and Ink
  Source: ascii.co.uk (#3 on the page)

Other Themes

If you're looking for a more streamlined and simple start page, you can find some of my older themes in the other-themes/ directory. These are relatively simple and lightweight. Feel free to browse and choose from these themes.