Yes, get yourself eclipse glasses, a pinhole projector, a floppy disk, digital camera or whatever allows you to observe the eclipse safely – no phenomenon is worth risking your eyesight over. However, the consensus is that you can watch the sun flares without protection during totality. The totality lasted 0 to 4 minutes depending on your location.

…and ignore one of the coolest things there is to see on the sky

A solar or lunar eclipse?

If you don’t want to use the potentially unstable Nightly, Dev or Beta, you can use Fennec (stable builds with dev features).