Home Assistant Add-On: Firefox

[Mincka]

Home Assistant Add-on: Firefox

Run Firefox as a browser inside Home Assistant to access local or external web sites from your home.

This is my first Home Assistant Add-on and my first repo. I’ll try my best to improve things based on your feedback, thank you!

About

Mozilla Firefox is a free and open-source web browser developed by Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, Mozilla Corporation.

This add-on is based on the docker image from Jocelyn Le Sage.

A huge thank to him for the great containers created and maintained.
He’s the real hero who needs to be supported.

Installation

If you want to do add the repository manually, please follow the procedure highlighted in the Home Assistant website. Use the following URL to add this repository: https://github.com/mincka/ha-addons

Refresh your browser and install the add-on from the new repository:

How to use

Just install, start the container and click on “Open Web UI”. You can use “Show in sidebar” for easy access. Everything you do is persisted in Firefox. Even if you stop the Add-on or restart Home Assistant host OS.

Downloads

The files downloaded in Firefox are automatically stored to your /share/firefox folder.

Import bookmarks

You can import bookmarks.html file by dropping them in your /share/firefox folder and import the bookmarks.html file in Firefox.

Todo

• [ ] Make it compatible with apparmor
• [ ] Looks like there is some kind of timeout when the addon is not used 60 seconds when using Nabu Casa. This looks like something I can fix this by using a reverse proxy setup.

More in the pipe

I plan to also release an add-on with a full desktop.

[sparkydave (🇦🇺 Dave)]

This is awesome! Finally a simple way for me to remotely access internal websites (device GUI’s) without having to use proxies etc to bypass the HTTPS limitation.

Thank you

[duceduc]

this looks like a neat addon.

[spanzetta (Stefano Panzetta)]

Tried to use on my Raspberry PI3A+… and … it’s almost unusable… too slow… the system stop responding completelly when using it…

[miguelpucela]

It works great!

Thank you!

[duceduc]

Would you be able to add this ssh addon to your project??

[Mincka]

You’re free to install any extension you want. The Firefox profile is persisted so you will keep your extensions and settings.

For SSH connections, I’d would recommend to use the Guacamole addon from Alexbelgium

hassio-addons/guacamole at master · alexbelgium/hassio-addons

You can use it to configure multiple connections for VNC, RDP, SSH…

[captainnapalm]

This is amazing. So many use cases for me, thank you.

[pes001]

Great idea but same experience. Doesn’t work on RPI3B+ 1GB, too slow and stops randomly. What are the minimum system requirements?

[e-raser]

Very cool. Running quite fine on a RPi 4 with 8 GB of RAM and slightly overclocked (within guarantee limits). Memory consumption is quite extensive though, roughly 500 MB in standby, up to 1 GB with a few simple tabs and a bit of surfing, will of course heavily depend on what is shown (probably video streaming will stress it heavily).

In terms of security of course one should keep in mind this makes access to your local resources even easier (scenario: someone got access to your HA instance). Depending on the individual setup probably just a theoretical thing.

Is it possible to use key combinations like e. g. Ctrl + t for a new tab? Even when in fullscreen mode, the actual browser (used for displaying HA / ingress / Firefox, also Firefox in my case) catches those unfortunately which makes efficient browsing a bit uncomfortable.

[Mincka]

I don’t think it’s possible. It’s up to the browser (and before to the OS) to forward keyboard shortcuts to a web site or not. It’s done in noVNC by adding buttons to the interface to send special shortcuts like ctrl+alt+del but in your case, it would not be relevant since it’s the same than clicking the “+” icon to open a new tab.

Ref: https://groups.google.com/g/novnc/c/sX7-T69ZrCg/m/6tOrPfwJBAAJ

[alexpi01 (Alex)]

It is indeed remarkable!
Of course, it is a breach of security… But it may be so usefull in some rare cases. I will not automatically start it on reboot and not showed in side bar and start it only in need.
Truth is if someone hacks my HA, and manage to break in, the intruder might install this addon by himself.

[Mincka]

A new “Edge” version is available. It’s based on Alpine Edge and attempts to update Firefox each time the container (re)start. The original version is now always using the repository and version of the base image.

[Bart-van-Gorp]

I’m getting the following error: Firefox disconnected on both versions.