Introducing Activity-aware Firefox A script to make KDE Plasma and Firefox work hand-in-hand
I am a big fan of both KDE and Mozilla software – while no software is perfect, of course, these two I like and trust the most when it comes to my desktop and web browsing respectively. To illustrate, I have been using KDE when it was still called the K(ool) Desktop Environment 1.x, and Mozilla since its Netscape and Phoenix days.
But as both KDE’s Plasma desktop and Mozilla’s Firefox browser each became more and more powerful, making use of their individual strengths started to produce some clashes.
One of the most powerful features of Plasma – and one that I make extensive use of – are its Activities1. I use them to keep different tasks in different environments and as such remove needless distractions.
For example, to list just a few, I have a “Communication” Activity where I keep all communication channels and generic web pages and try to spend as little time there as possible; an “Organise yourself”; a “Blogging” Actvity; and several ephemeral ones for each project I need concentrating on – two recent examples were “Presentation for FRI“ where I did research, wrote and presented from; and “Activity-aware Firefox” where I was coding and testing the script I am blogging about today.
And a feature that makes Activities immensely powerful is that you can stop/suspend the ones that you do not need active right now and it stops all that is happening in it. With this you can save a lot of processor and memory resources. Then later when you start the Activity again, it shows up in the same state it was stopped. Super practical!
