Meet the New Mastodon Client, Same as the Old Mastodon Client

Happily, after a tedious day at work, I found out that Firefox had a feature similar to the old prism functionality.

Single Site Browser

You can turn on a feature flag in the firefox about:config page called browser.ssb.enabled. Once dome you can launch a site in an isolated firefox window with firefox --ssb https://site.tld.

It just works™ … mostly.

Stow my shit

This meant I could add a masto.desktop file like this one (and a png icon) in ~/.local/share/applications

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Masto
GenericName=Mastodon Client
Comment=Mastodon Frontend in Firefox SSB
Exec=firefox --ssb https://sarcasm.stream
Icon=/home/myuser/.local/share/applications/mastodon.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Keywords=mastodon;
Categories=Application;

I lie, I added them in ~/.dotfiles/mastodon/.local/share/applications and then ran stow mastodon because stow is my new favourite thing.

My new window on the fediverse?

Now I have a faux mastodon app so hopefully it will spell the end of me losing the web page in a sea of tabs or accidentally closing it due to muscle memory.

At least, that’s the plan, I’m sure something will piss on my biscuits. First thing of note is that the context menu is disabled, which means no spelling corrections. This may prove hugely problematic.

Time will tell.