What are your favourite extensions?
I really enjoy Firefox on Android as I can install a bunch of extensions and I find those extensions game changer, especially on the mobile.
One of my favorites are
- Libredirect - literally one of my favorite ones. Redirects popular sites to privacy focused frontends, like YouTube to Invidious, etc.
- uBlock Origin - I guess everyone knows this one
- Privacy Badger - blocks trackers
- Ghostery - blocks trackers, ads, scripts, etc.
What extensions do you guys use?
Dark Reader: Especially late at night white page background just burns out my retinas, no idea how I ever managed before.
I use that one on Android, since I have a OLED screen and it seems to do wonders for my battery life.
It seems to do weird things to some websites where for me it also leaves text dark/black
I find it works fine for most websites and I just disable per site if DR has made a website unreadable
Sometimes it doesn't work, especially when it is a particularly weird colour palette, but it gets it right most of the time. In that case it does have the options to make some adjustments or just turn it of for that particular site.
Did you try to reduce the brightness of your monitor?
That isn't the same thing..
Sadly, even at the lowest brightness setting, with "extra dim" enabled, and the most intense blue blocking filter my phone will allow, most light colored backgrounds still illuminate the hell out of the room.
Can it auto detect when a website supports dark theme? Otherwise I noticed that it will ruin the colors of sites already in dark theme
There's an option in settings, although it isn't perfect.
for some reason Dark Reader slows down page loading by a lot for me, especially on slow connections
Yeah, in the default settings it analyzes the CSS which will make page load appear slower. It has other options you might consider but I only have it enabled at night when I'm drowsy. (The slow page loads help slow my brain down lol.)
Ah, I gotta thank Chrome for finally making me do the change from it to Firefox when they dropped the flag for switching the web page to dark mode (when dark mode is triggered) in Android mobile... Since that moment I haven't looked back, and it seems like there is no reason to do so.
Tab Snooze - allows you to close a tab and have it reappear at a chosen time later
Media URL Timestamper - automatically inserts the current timestamp of the YouTube/Twitch video you're watching and updates it in the history in case you accidentally close/navigate away from the page or go to a different time in the video
Feedbro - RSS reader with filtering capabilities
Redirector - auto-redirect specific URLs (for example, changing a YouTube Shorts url into a regular one, or changing Reddit links to always go to Old Reddit)
Undo Close Tab Button - allows you to restore recently closed tabs including the tab's history in the back button (max amount = browser.sessionstore.max_tabs_undo)
Violentmonkey - using userscripts that allow you to change things on websites.
/^(Key)?(End|I|O)|(Digit|Numpad)\d$/instead of/^(?:Digit|Numpad)\d$/(thanks to this post), to also disable the End/I/O keys in addition to the number keys.*.youtube.com/*then put*://*.youtube.com/*in the "@match rules" line in the settings)YouTube Comment Reader - allows you to search through the comments of a video (by clicking on the addon in the Extension menu and then clicking on the "YouTube Comment Reader" at the top or the "X Comments" at the bottom of the tooltip)
Page Shadow - allows you to use dark and light themes on sites that don't have the option to change it.
And if you're like me and you find that some YT videos feel too slow but 1.25x is too fast, then you can use Enhancer for YouTube's "Playback speed" feature to have smaller speed steps. Then you can hold ctrl and use the scrollwheel (while over the video) to change the video's speed by the amount you chose (I use 0.05 speed variation, mostly changing to 1.05x or 1.10x)
Undo close tab is already a feature in most browsers. Ctrl shift t (or cmd shift t).
It adds a list of the most recently closed tabs to the tab context menu
Fair enough. I thought this was already a feature too but I don't see it. Very cool, thank you for sharing!
Consent-o-matic !
That's the same as Ublock Origin - Anoyances list, you don't need a separate addon for that.
Ublock Origin -> Settings -> External Filters -> Annoyances -> Tick all
Consent-o-Matic actually declines the cookies but that just hides the banner
I need to try consent I magic then because at least one website has had the banner blocked but didn't let me move the screen or anything.
Ublock origin, Sponsor block, and NoScript
I've been faithful to firefox almost since it's been out thanks to this. I can't imagine being on the internet with everything on a website on by default
A few years back NoScript was often recommended. I used it for a while but I'm not sure I did it right.
First time you go to a new website do you go through the process of allowing some scripts to make it usable?
Pretty much, yeah.
A community shared list of preferences for each website would be handy! but I don't know if it's feasible in terms of privacy
Sponsorblock's been epic! Props to the coder and the contributors.
And of course uBlock Origin. :)
You don't need all of that at once. Privacy Badger and Ghostery are redundant with uBlock Origin and Total Cookie Protection. Source: https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions#-dont-bother.
Also, Ghostery is kinda shady in terms of opt-out tracking and showing ads to its own users. I don't know if they still do it, but my trust is already shattered and I see no reason to keep using Ghostery.
Aside from the standard one's I see:
Streaming enhanced: Netflix Disney+ Prime Video
Haven't seen anyone mention Decentraleyes yet. Serves CDN assets locally to avoid CDNs as a vector for tracking or fingerprinting.
Some of my picks to add to all other comments
I also have many ***monkey and stylus scripts.
Ublock Origin: No brainer. You can block just about every intrusive component of the modern internet with just this.
Stylus: Write CSS themes for websites
User-Agent Manager: For compatibility purposes, switch your user-agent to chromium on some websites
Libredirect
ClearURLs: Copy links without tracking or affiliation
Dark Reader: Dark mode everywhere
Temporary Containers: Provides some nifty shortcuts and features for creating temporary containers
I remember using "Stylish" back in the day, but there was some changing of ownership and data being harvested & sold.
But I guess this is fork of it?
Didn’t see it mentioned — SingleFile is an awesome tool to save the whole page as a single compatible with everything HTML file with embedded css and images.
I use these ones frequently:
Not on mobile but on desktop Firefox Multi-Account Containers paired with Temporary Containers is a funcking godsend. Especially so when I'm doing web dev work.
Other that that uBlock is pretty high on the list as usuall.
For me, it's many of the ones people have already said, plus:
Privacy redirect is unmaintained, not updated for 3 years, switch to LibRedirect
Thank you for taking the time to write this, LibRedirect is so much better!
Does privacy redirect automatically know if the instance is healthy? Or does it sometimes redirect you to a invidious or nitter or libreddit instance that's broken?
Because if this thing is health-aware, the. It would save me so much time.
Unfortunately, I think it just picks randomly. I have had times where it has redirected me to an instance that is down. That said, if you have an instance you know is stable, it does give you a drop-down to always redirect to a specific one.
Cloud to butt
I've been using it for such a long time. It's only on my PC. I don't use my PC for much anymore, so when I see the word "butt" when it should say "cloud," I get a little chuckle.
Sieberry, it's what Mozilla is unable to do, nice looking and working vertical tabs.
Simple Translate is nice too just mark a text and instant translation.
I still don't care about cookies, yeah just leave me alone.
Scroll everywhere, right Click to scroll any page. Should be vanilla feature.
Keepa, for amazon price history of any product.
Imho sideberry looks rather clunky and shoehorned. Fonts dont even match the rest of firefox’s gui. Cant use it after experiencing Vivaldi.
Did you see the new ff vertical tabs in nightly firefox labs?
Not yet. I use my own carefully adjusted Firefox CSS, so I don't want to mess with it right now.
Apart from what everyone already posted:
uBlacklist - hides some pages from search engine search results (I use it to hide reddit) - https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
Tridactyl - like Surfingkeys, Vimium etc. - more vimlike experience for Firefox - you can also optionally install a native extension to run shell commands in the os from within ff (yeah dangerous): https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl
Fellow tridactyl enthusiast reporting for duty!
It has been a game changer, especially with repetitive work tasks
Can you please explain an example workflow?
So just as a caveat, I imagine Tridactyl would really mostly be appreciated by those with a modal, and specifically Vim inspired mentality; its mission, after all, is to bring vim-like bindings and workflow to Firefox. This is mostly to say, it may not appeal to you otherwise (but who knows!)
If you are already familiar with how key bindings are set in vim you'll hit the ground running. In fact, many keys are pretty intuitive since they match vim, eg, scrolling up/down is controlled with
jork.I may not use every single function built into Tridactyl everyday, but as a person who likes to reduce his reliance on a mouse, I can easily navigate both a page and the web at large entirely with my keyboard. Typing
fputs a hint at every link that you can follow by typing the letter in the hint.]]or[[can auto increment pages on forums (eg going from page 2 to page 3). I can quickly traverse my history, bookmarks, etc with a command prompt that can also access nearly every feature of Firefox. I often use a binding to pin tabs or close them, etc.On a regular day that might be all I do.
On the other end of the spectrum, I'll give a more extreme example. A friend needed help with his company's wordpress site. They had a couple hundred articles that needed a uniform change. While there was probably an easier and smarter way of doing it, I used Tridactyl (with a healthy dose of pyAutoGui) to automate it. I made a couple of commands in Tridactyl to do things like open certain links as new tabs, navigate to each tab, open the WYSIWYG editor for each page, locate particular text, delete and replace it), save, and move to the next tab and repeat. I was able to do this with about 10-15 articles at a time...I got paid to press a couple keys, walk off to do something with my kid and come back to check on it from time to time (I added in fail-safes for when it needed manual intervention). Admittedly, this did go beyond the scope of Tridactyl, but it was an invaluable part of the whole deal.
Another time I was doing a data entry job and needed to transfer both the hyperlink of, and several pieces of info, into a spreadsheet. It occurred to me that it would be nice to grab the URLs of all the pages I had open at once instead of manually going to each tab copying the url, alt-tabbing to the spreadsheet and pasting just to alt tab back to FF going to a new tab copying the url and so on.
The creator of Tridactyl helped me write a command that allowed me to open as many tabs as necessary, and copy to the clipboard every URL of each tab open from the one I was on until there were no more tabs, each separated by a comma to easily paste into the spreadsheet. Saved me so much time and carpal tunnel.
Ultimately, describing a few things I've used it for is a disservice because if you ask the next person, they'll use it completely differently.
Thanks for the exhaustive explanation. You don't use it on mobile, I guess. 😎
No I don't. I imagine it wouldn't really be worth it on mobile. I also realize that was the point of the og post, but I had to respond when I saw someone else mention it 😂
The usual +
I think it's more performant and lightweight than dark reader. So I get more screentime.
I have found localcdn to break some websites
Me too and I found remove/reinstall fixed the issue
Must haves IMHO:
uBlock Origin Consent-o-Matic
Making life easier:
SponsorBlock Enhancer for YouTube DarkReader Multi Account Containers
ClearURLs
It makes, say, Amazon links not a three-page bookwork
Use uBlock Origin's wiki / rules for this instead. Reduces an add-on and achieves the same/better results!
How does it work? I added the Adguard filter Not doesn't seem to work like cleanurls
Example searching something on Amazon
Cleanurls
Ublock
Should be detailed here: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax#removeparam
Just gonna keep cleanurls, it's better and not so complicated
Vimium
Redirector
(And OFC all the other great ones, Dark Reader, Chameleon, NoScript, AdBlocker Ultimate.)
whats the difference between adblocker ultimate and ublock origin?
It seems like it may have been made in response to Adblock Plus's (ABP) acceptable ads garbage.
makes sense, but whats the difference between it and ublock origin?
No idea.
understandable
😎🤙
Ublock Origin, NoScript, Chameleon, Libredirect, DarkReader, OneTab, Stack Overflow Prettifier, Classic Mode For Wikipedia, Vimium
My favourites are:
uBlock Origin (this is the real one) uBlacklist (this blocks sites from your search results)
Gesturefy: It brings the mouse gesture functionality known from Opera to Firefox.
Since it's not mentioned before, check out DeArrow. It makes YouTube bearable.
Dark Reader is sort of annoying to set up, but I like it. It would be better if you could choose to share your location with it rather than inputting your lat/long manually. (It's possible that's a limitation of extensions though.)
I use the DDG extension too but it's caused problems by blocking a webpage on localhost for some reason. Not sure what it does that uBO and Privacy Badger cannot.
I haven't used https://adnauseam.io/ but I like the idea of it. I stick with uBO and use AdGuard's public DNS in my router (too lazy to set up pihole).
Chameleon. My user agent changes every 30 seconds. Makes attempts to track me basically useless.
Changing your user agent will not stop you being tracked. Browser fingerprinting can work with heaps of different signals, and is very difficult to block.
It means I'm being tracked for 30 seconds. So basically useless tracking.
Chameleon doesn't just change the user agent. It changes a bunch of stuff that's used to break fingerprinting. Of course you have a fingerprint, but it constantly changes so that the data they collect is so short lived that its useless to them and therefore very useful to me.
You can try to fool it with a VPN, change country, etc but it doesn't work. Fingerprinting is very strong these days.
That website is marketing bullshit. It doesn't tell you if you fingerprint "ID" is unique. If can just spit out the same fingerprint for millions of users, and it looks impressive but its totally worthless as a fingerprint.
Try again with some service that isn't trying to sell you their product
https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/index.html
Your extension might make you MORE finger-printable. Advanced fingerprinting scripts can detect lies told by extensions.
https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/3.3-Overrides-%5BTo-RFP-or-Not%5D#-fingerprinting
If you're actually interested in reducing your fingerprint you should read the arkenfox guide which leverages built in features from firefox. You'll see very quickly that if someone wants to fingerprint you it's trivial and there's little you can do short of TOR.
more reading: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers/?h=fingerprint#anti-fingerprinting
Again, they can fingerprint me. Buy their fingerprint is useless because it constantly changes.
You misunderstand. They're calculating a fingerprint that identifies you across sessions despite you changing up a bunch of values on your browser with an extension because that's all highly detectable. They know it's junk data they don't use it. It actually is worse because you stop blending in with the crowd.
You're better off blending in then trying to look unique with every visit. The latter is a flawed concept.
Read the arkenfox guide they get into it. Most extensions just reduce your ability to blend in to the crowd and thus should be avoided.
They don't. I'm telling you they don't. When I disable my ad blocker, the ads I see are not relevant to me. Many times they're not even in a language that I can speak.
They are not tracking me between sessions. Its obvious.
What you're saying makes sense, and its why Tor does what it does. But in practice, this works too.
If you try with a Tor browser you'll get a unique ID everytime.
Feel free to try this one instead: https://www.amiunique.org/fingerprint
Or whatever website you prefer, really. Fingerprinting is not solved by a single extension or checkbox. It's really hard.
Are you passing CloudFlare captchas with that? I'm using a VPN and whenever I hit a CloudFlare captcha with a modified user agent, it doesn't let me pass.
Sometimes. It depends if the admin misconfigured their cloudflare.
I dont have issues logging into cloudflare's website itself with this setup. I have had to email many website admins to let them know that they have a broken cloudflare config.
Doesn't that fuck up logins and stuff?
Nope. Why would it?
I would imagine many services would think you're hijacking the session or something.
No, that would he a very dumb system. Because it would false positive every time someone changed their user agent, which is a common defense tactic in today's threat landscape.
You don't want to ban someone for protecting themselves. But I'm sure there are dumb execs who have thought this was a good idea until someone on the sec team slapped them and said "no"
Bitwarden. Hands down the best decision I made in regards to web safety was switching to a proper password manager.
Close second is uBlock Origin.
Also make sure to use DecentralEyes for easy enhanced privacy.
I use NoScript, but that level of granular control isn't everyone's cup of tea
Not trying to hijack this post but does anyone know of an add-on that syncs your bookmarks toolbar? Its the only thing holding me back from being fully on librewolf.
Librewolf has Mozilla sync, otherwise you could try using a third party syncing tool to sync your librewolf profile directory?
Thanks, this will probably be the way I go.
More info for those curious:
https://librewolf.net/docs/faq/#can-i-use-firefox-sync-with-librewolf-is-it-safe-to-do-so
PS LibreWolf will not keep your accounts signed in unless you modify it. It was designed that way on purpose.
I'd second Mozilla sync, especially as you can self-host the server.
I do that and it works really well, but you still need to use Mozilla's servers for authentification. But it's been a while so maybe there's a way to host that too now.
I use Floccus.
Thanks for the info.
enhanced-h264ify prevents my PC from cooking itself when playing YT.
uBlock Origin and DarkReader
Recently got into using RSS feeds, so RSSHub Radar was quite useful
Search by Image is good too
These are all the extension I have installed and they are all my favourite tbh. I also have Firefox set to use strongest protection.
I often use:
Not on mobile, but desktop:
• Enhancer for YouTube, I like it for having the “expand” making the screen bigger also cinema mode, toggling end cards off, boost volume — you can also take screenshots.
• uBlock Origin, of course
• SponsorBlock, which is a big extension that will auto skip sponsor readouts, selfpromos, and a lot of things YouTubers often do (sponsors, self promos, interaction reminders like liking and subscribing, intermissions, intros, previews, jokes, etc - you can choose to skip them or highlight them in the videos) it’s backed by community response, anyone with the extension can set up something to skip and share with everyone. Highly recommend if you’re tired of people pausing the video to talk about raycons or manscaped lol
I thought you could only select from a pre-defined list of addons in Firefox mobile?
I think developers can upload their own addons for Android now. Or at least I saw quite a wide range of addons available when I went looking for some.
Not anymore, if you use desktop website of addons.mozilla.org, you can install almost anything.
Fakespot for amazon/ebay reviews
Indie wiki buddy. Fandom often times comes on top for most searches, but many games actually have their official wikis elsewhere. This extension hides fandom links for unofficial fandom wikis.
Making a note to myself about Sponsorblock and chameleon
Highlight or Hide Search Engine Results
i still use google, so being able to filter out the blogspam and fandom slop is a godsend for usability
I may be biased, but I like Lemmy Infinite Scroller. It started out as a 20 minute project just as a proof of concept and then evolved into me trying to make an infinite scroller that works really well. It works well, I can't recall if I made it open-source but I didn't obfuscate the code or anything like that so it's practically open-source anyway even if I didn't make a repo for it. I just published the manifest v3 update of it last week so it's pretty futureproof too.
Other obvious extensions are uBlock Origin, uMatrix, and surprisingly one called Dark Background and Light Text (though DarkReader is also cool too).