Discord in Firefox, with themes, plugins and RPC for free
Tags: discord, firefox, extensions, tutorial
Published: 2024-02-07 19:54:31

Discord traditionally runs on an Electron app, which means it's basically just a website wrapped in a Chromium browser, so it's pretty heavy, and I really don't want that. I prefer to have Discord in the browser.

Getting Discord in the browser is easy, just go to https://discord.com/app. The problem however is that you don't get RPC (rich presence, which is the famous "blabla is playing ...").

Luckily, there's a project that lets you do all of that, plus it also lets you get plugins to Discord and themes, which looks pretty great. This project is named Vencord and is very easy to install on Chromium based browsers, but unfortunately doesn't work on Firefox because the developers had some trouble getting it to the Add-ons store.

That's why I want to write about how to get it working on Firefox.

## Installing Vencord

1. First, you need to install Firefox Developer Edition. You can probably find it in your package manager (`firefox-devedition` under NixOS for instance) or on the Mozilla website [here](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/)
2. Download the Vencord Firefox extension from the GitHub Release. Here's a [direct download link](https://github.com/Vendicated/Vencord/releases/download/devbuild/extension-firefox.zip). 
3. You now have to disable the signing verification of Firefox add-ons by going in `about:config`, searching `xpinstall.signatures.required` and toggle it to **false**.
4. Load Vencord by going into `about:addons`, clicking on the settings wheel and clicking on **Install Add-On From File**

![Screenshot of the location of the button to install the addon](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/ko7rara95a3w6ksaa2te.png)

5. Load [Discord](https://discord.com/app) in your browser. If you now open the Discord settings, you should see a new section called "Vencord"

![Screenshot of the Vencord section of the Discord settings](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/iymh96nod701q3awze1y.png)

Vencord is now successfully installed.

## Getting rich presence
Getting Discord rich presence (RPC) you'll need to install a software on your computer to listen to the RPC connections and transmit them to Discord through the RPC plugin of Vencord.

1. Enable the RPC plugin by going into the Vencord plugin settings of your Discord settings and enable the **WebRichPresence (arRPC)** plugin. 
2. Install NodeJS 18 or above, which is required to run the arRPC server. You can probably install it from your package manager or [set it up manually from the official website](https://nodejs.org/en/download/)
3. Download/clone the [GitHub arRPC repository](https://github.com/OpenAsar/arrpc), then run `npm install` and `node src` to run the server.

```bash
git clone https://github.com/OpenAsar/arrpc
cd arrpc
npm install
node src
```

4. If you reload Discord and run some game, it should now show up on Discord without any problem. 
5. Tell your operating system to run at boot in the background (for example in the "exec" section in Hyprland, or in a systemd service, a cron job, etc) that way you won't have to worry about starting the server since it will be done automatically for you.

## Other Vencord stuff
Vencord is also pretty nice because you can install themes and get a ton of other plugins. You have plugins like "FakeNitro" which lets you get some Nitro features without paying anything, and many more.

Vencord also prevents some Discord tracking out of the box. 

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/wuc57gpgbtvtpkb2wbql.png)

You can also install themes by going to the "Theme" settings tab, then click on "BetterDiscord Themes" and choose whatever theme you like. Download the themes you like, then return to the Vencord settings and upload the theme.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/vo8shxk2wu6y8b8lgxob.png)

Now congratulations you just themed, added features, removed some tracking, and removed Electron from Discord. Have fun!