What browser extensions do you use that you’d recommend to others?
Do you contribute to any FOSS browser extension projects?
Are there any non-FOSS extensions that you wish had a sufficient FOSS alternative?
Firefox user here.
- Bitwarden password manager
- Bypass Paywalls Clean
- Clear URLs remove URL trackers
- Highlight or Hide Search Engine Results to hide some unwanted websites from search results
- Open in VLC™ media player, useful for some weird streams
- Push to Kindle sends any text article to PDF or to your ereader (not only Kindle)
- Recipe Filter filters recipe pages on blogs and just gets the actual ingredients & instructions
- Redirector for a few paywalls where I use a specific proxy
- RSS Reader Extension (by Inoreader) - as I use Inoreader for following RSS feeds
- Sci Hub Injector adds sci-hub links to many science publishing websites for easy access
- Shinigami Eyes highlights trans-friendly and transphobic social media users or websites
- uBlock Origin
- ViolentMonkey for userscripts
Extensions to be helpful to other people:
- Picket Line Notifier tells you if the website you are visiting has workers on strike - useful especially for ecommerce & news publishers
- Snowflake is not noticeable for me, but allows other people to use my network as a Tor node or something idk
- Wayback Machine archives every page I visit on the Internet Archive.
Fediverse extensions:
- FediAct allows me to boost, reply to, follow, etc. on any Mastodon instance without having to open the right link in my own instance. I wish there was something like this for Lemmy and Peertube.
- Fedishare allows for one-click sharing to several Fediverse platforms, including Lemmy and Mastodon
- PeerTubeify tries to check if a YouTube video you’re watching is also on PeerTube
Youtube extensions:
- Auto HD / 4k / 8k pour YouTube™ - I use it for the environment, so default quality is 480px (because usually I watch the videos on a small side window so it doesn’t change the visible quality)
- Clickbait Remover for YouTube - replaces thumbnails with a frame from the video and makes all titles normally named, no all caps
- DF YouTube (Distraction Free) - removes the homepage & sidebar on videos to avoid rabbit holes
- SponsorBlock auto-skips sponsored segments, intros, credit rolls, etc. on YouTube videos
uBO, of course. note: you guys don’t need ClearURLs with this list added.
LibRedirect for automatically opening Youtube, Twitter, TikTok etc. links in their privacy-focused front-ends. I just make sure to disable all the instances by esmailelbob since he’s a little homophobic shithead
Buster for automatic captcha solving
Consent-O-Matic automatically clicks through cookies banner to deny all the cookies that aren’t necessary, which I like better than just hiding the cookie banner
Redirect AMP to HTML because fuck AMP and fuck GoogleHe was in one of my instance lists on the extension, that’s disgusting. Removed immediately. Even if you forget how disgusting his views are, how can you can you trust an instance that monitors activity and keeps track of what you’re doing?
Consent-O-Matic sounds really nice, thanks for sharing.
+1 for Consent-O-Matic.
uBlock Origin - as ad and script blocker
Dark Reader - for dark mode on every site
Sidebery - for tab management
One that I love is jumpcutter. Speeds up silences and makes watching long lectures way nice.
If I get back to my PC I’ll send a few more extensions I use.
One I haven’t seen mentioned yet is DownThemAll.
DownThemAll lets you download all the links or images on a website and much more: you can refine your downloads by fully customizable filters to get only what you really want.
Comes in really handy sometimes. (For Firefox / Chrome / Edge)
Another is uBlacklist, which allows you to blacklist domains from Google / Bing / DDG search results (like say, pinterest.*), also for Firefox / Chrome / Edge.
I used to use DownThemAll way back, but I’m not sure what I’d use it for now. What are you downloading?
uBlacklist seems like it could be very useful.
Mostly if I find an open directory with stuff I like. Also it has come in handy downloading maps from government websites. It’s more of a “handy to have” than “day to day use”
Firefox:
- uBlock Origin (uBO) - The internet is basically unusable without this. {GPLv3}
- Dark Reader - I like using dark themes and I hate when I get blasted with a light theme when I visit a site. This keeps that to a minimum. {MIT}
- Firefox Multi-Account Containers - It’s nice to keep things separated. {Mozilla Public License Version 2.0}
- Consent-O-Matic - Automatically marks my saved cookie preferences on consent pop ups. This is a great tool to help counter to the dark patterns related to GDPR, but it isn’t perfect. {MIT}
- NoScript - I don’t like giving blanket permission to run JavaScript in my browser. This let’s me choose. {GPLv3}
- Wayback Machine by Internet Archive - Archives the sites I visit automatically and provides a one click option to visit an archived version of a URL that returns 404. Proprietary
- Tampermonkey - There are a few very useful scripts that I run periodically. Tampermonkey keeps them organized and easy to run. Proprietary
- Reddit Enhancement Suite - I got a lot of value from this extension over the years, but I don’t know how much value it has going forward for me {GPLv3}
I use the following ones (on Firefox), except for uBO the others are just for conveniency:
- Bitwarden
- Gesturefy (for some time from early 2021 to late 2022 I used to use Vivaldi as my primary browser and now if I’m using a mouse, not having gestures in a browser feels odd…)
- LibRedirect
- Plasma Integration
- uBlock Origin (middle mode and with some additional lists)
- User-Agent Switcher and Manager (if I find a site that says it doesn’t work with Firefox).
Bitwarden+ublock+libredirect
I see a lot of people using decentraleyes, no script, privacy badger, etc along ublock. Just wanna point out that these with ublock are generally redundant and actually increase your fingerprint.
You’re right, preventing tracking and canvas fingerprinting ironically is in itself a fairly unique fingerprint. Although I’m not sure if not using decentraleyes is worth the tradeoff. It prevents hitting more third party sources altogether at the marginal cost of making you slightly more unique to the first party. Happy to learn more if I misunderstood.
For privacy & security:
- DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials
- uBlock Origin
- Privacy Badger
For usability:
- Wappalyzer - Technology profiler
- Firefox Translations
- Flagfox
- Grammar & Spell Checker—LanguageTool
What does Flagfox do?
Flagfox is an extension that displays a flag icon indicating the current web server’s physical location.
Is that more of a curiosity for you or is there more reason to use it?
It is more of a curiosity for mine.
uBlock Origin, Bypass Paywalls Clean, Bitwarden, and SponsorBlock for YouTube are my favorite ones.
I cannot stand SponsorBlock anymore. It’s been abused so much, that any time any video even slightly mentions a brand, sponsor or not, it skips it.
I find that it breaks context in a lot of videos, and you end up missing important stuff. I especially find it to be true in LTT videos.
For me, SponsorBlock is disabled until they fix the abuse. There’s a very clear difference between a SPONSOR and just mentioning an entity that exists on this planet.
FoxyProxy in addition to many aforementioned extensions. Tor and popular VPNs just don’t work in my whereabouts, so, I have to use something more sophisticated like shadowsocks, for example, in order to circumvent government censorship and geoblocks.
I’m not sure what good it could do in the US but I’m happy it helps you, assuming you’re using it in an ethically sound manner.
