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Good Firefox extensions?
I just switched over to Firefox from Brave and I'm really liking it so far. Any essential extensions I should get or settings I should tweak?
I just switched over to Firefox from Brave and I'm really liking it so far. Any essential extensions I should get or settings I should tweak?
Let's see what's built up in there since I switched from Chrome when Quantum was released.
I have a few loaded just for reddit as well...
Firefox has a pretty decent built-in screenshot tool, have you given it a try?
Agreed. For anyone wondering, it's hidden under the "..." menu in the URL bar.
Also, you can just right click on the page and click "take a screenshot".
It was having issues with large pages (think like 20+ vertical) that fireshot was working around. I haven't checked in a while, those issues might be fixed by now.
The saving built-in screenshot button within Firefox is very crappy in terms of elementary privacy design.
How do you mean it? Are you talking about the screenshot sharing?
Yep.
Why do you think that? The only thing I can think of is some kind of password, but that seems like not very necessary feature for sharing screenshots.
I have the duckduckgo extension. Does that do the same thing as HTTPS everywhere?
One of the feature of the DDG extension is that it enforces HTTPS connections, so if you have the extension you don't need HTTPS Everywhere.
Alright. Great!
Great list except you forgot NoScript
Once I got comfortable with uMatrix I ditched NoScript because the UI was annoying as hell by comparison, and uMatrix does almost everything that NoScript does too.
Good to know. Thanks
Tree Style Tab. Puts your tabs in a vertical list along the side, with collapsible trees. Must-have for people who constantly have many tabs open.
Personally I prefer Panorama View.
Since plenty of people have covered the basics already (uBlock, uMatrix, HTTPS Everywhere, Password managers, reddit related ones, etc) I will just list some of the more obscure ones I have installed that I still think are essential.
Bypass Paywalls - does exactly what it says for tons of of news sites, but unfortunately was recently removed by Mozilla for "violating ToS" (but can still be installed manually with the XPI file)
Don't touch my tabs! (rel=noopener) - "Prevent tabs opened by a hyperlink from hijacking the previous tab by adding the rel=noopener attribute to all hyperlinks (excluding same-domain hyperlinks)." Why that isn't default behavior I honestly don't know but I am extremely glad this add-on exists.
View Image - "Re-implements the google image, "View Image" and "Search by Image" buttons." Because fuck you, Getty Images.
Address Bar Subreddit Shortcut - "Allows one to go directly to a subreddit on Reddit by simply typing "/r/[subreddit]" (where "[subreddit]" is the subreddit name/slug) into the address bar."
Tridactyl - "Replace Firefox's control mechanism with one modelled on Vim." Great for keyboard navigation while browsing.
Tree Tabs - Vertical tab manager. Great for if you browse like I do with a bajillion tabs open at all times and also great for if you remove the top tab bar using userchrome.css like I did as well. Tree Style Tabs is also great but I prefer the cleaner look and added tab organization related features of Tree Tabs.
Rename Tab Title - works great with Tree Tabs to keep things even more organized.
Simple Translate - I was desperately missing this feature coming from Chrome since I require it so frequently and this is by far the simplest and most convenient one I could find for Firefox.
YouTube Classic -Automatically disables YouTube's Polymer Web Components, which the new design uses. Ever notice those grey bars instead of text when you first open YouTube and every time you open a video? This gets rid of that garbage and makes everything load as plaintext again. It also tightens up the whitespace significantly so the site doesn't feel like it was designed with tablets taking priority over desktops anymore.
Video DownloadHelper - Does what it says and even works on sites that use sequentially loaded segmented videos in an attempt to prevent you from downloading them as one complete video file.
Stylus - "Easily install custom themes from popular online repositories, or create, edit, and manage your own personalized CSS stylesheets." Not obscure but absolutely essential, IMO, and I have yet to see it mentioned. It's how I make Tildes look like this: https://gitlab.com/Bauke/styles/tree/master/css/tildes-dracula#screenshots <3 @Bauke and his Dracula Theme
And finally Tildes Extended - Adds some nice features to Tildes, which I honestly can't live without, e.g. a floating "Back to Top" and "Next New Comment" button that takes you to the next newest comment in a topic. Thanks again for making it @crius, <3 you too. :)
A better link for the Bypass Paywalls extension is: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox/releases (the author uploaded an .xpi that autoupdates a few minutes before you posted your comment).
Ah, okay thanks for the heads up! I updated my link to that official XPI file now too.
Wow, moved back over to Chrome after an extension like Vimiumfx (not sure if that's actually the name... blurry memory, haha) announced that it would no longer be maintaining itself and posting updates (along with many other extensions but that one was the most important for me) following some Firefox browser extension update. I had tried other similar extensions, but they just didn't cut it for me. It's my first time hearing about Tridactyl, though! Would love to give that a shot!
Among what everyone else has already said, consider using a password manager and installing their respective extension. For example, I use LastPass and have their extension installed. The extension typically auto-inserts your login data so you don't have to retrieve it manually all the time. Makes it a lot easier for me to make use of unique secure passwords for each website, instead of using the same exact (or slightly modified) password that is literally only a six-letter word + a letter + a number (still surprised that sucker was never cracked).
uBlock Origin, Privacy Possum, uMatrix, Multi-Account Containers, and HTTPS Everywhere are my must-haves on any computer (or mobile device). On desktops I also insist on (IIRC) Gesturefy.
Here's what I use: ublock origin, secure password generator, old/compact reddit redirect.
Since nobody has mentioned it yet, Vim Vixen is by far the best vim emulator I've found. The only weird thing is that it's busted on Tildes of all places. (!!!)
Is the issue with it on Tildes that the console doesn't show? I know that there's an issue with sites that have restrictive Content Security Policies (which Tildes does), but just wanted to check and see if there was something more than that.
It winds up looking something like this: https://imgur.com/a/T8sjpBv
First picture is the "normal view" when I'm browsing around - a strange empty box sitting up there (I imagine it's the "console box" which is likely normally hidden)
Second picture is what happens when the console is activated. Also, all F-based find functionality is absurdly broken on the website (with the letters being rendered, but places all over the webpage in un-intuitive locations).
I am surprised that nobody has mentioned Facebook Container yet: Segregate your Facebook/Instagram cookies into a separate container so that they are not accessible by FB beacons while you browse other sites.
I use this for "dark mode"
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-background-light-text/
Regarding settings, I recommend following the about:config settings from privacytools.io. To be fair, the whole page is worthwhile.
On side note can anyone find a dark mode for the mobile version that covers most everything?
I'm going to put in my list while trying to omit ones that have already been mentioned. Here goes:
For the devs amongst us:
I have more, but I don't really see them as being too useful - it's more random stuff that I find interesting or whatever. Also, if anyone has a good tool for translating the entire page into English, I'll be forever grateful. I would prefer it not going to Google, but at this point I'm not going to hate.
Nice! Thank you very much! That should save a bit of time with Firefox loading extensions at startup!
Aside from the standard add-ons, Simple Tab Groups is probably my favourite: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-groups/?src=search
Being able to organize tabs by topics is a lifesaver.
One that I don't see here but really like is OneTab. It lets you collapse all your open tabs into a list of links for later perusal. They bill it as a ram savings, but I find it super useful when I'm working on a project to just save all my tabs that way, and then restore them all at once when I come back to it.
I can't thank @Deimos enough for having introduced me to LeechBlock. It's saved so many hours of my day. In a nutshell, it can block whatever website you choose to, for whatever period of the day. My config is here; basically, I'm allowed to browse Tildes, Youtube, HN & Reddit for an hour between 8pm--midnight, but I can see if I have any messages or updates from these websites anytime I want. But because I can’t browse for a long time, I can’t make many comments, and have too many comments to respond to, and thus that doesn’t ever consume too much time for me. I can also do whatever I want on Saturday. On mobile I don’t have this extension, but then I hate typing on mobile, so that’s not a problem too. This has been one piece of software that has made a big change to my life.
FWIW here is the projects Github page, it is OSS w/ MPL. I was concerned when I first learned about this because I couldn't access the source code through the website, and thus I started using it a week later than I normally would.
Greasemonkey is great software. It is one of the things that makes Firefox come closer to being "free software" indeed. You can run JS on websites you browse to modify their looks.
With Redirector you can set redirects on URLs that match given globs or regexps. For example, I use it to redirect all reddit.com to old.reddit.com.
Zotero and Zotero Connector are very useful for managing your archive of documents and other research material. With the connector, you can import PDFs, web pages and other stuff directly from Firefox.
Nice, I'm glad that Leechblock has been useful. I really like how flexible it is, to be able to set up the different time periods and things like the exceptions for notifications pages that you did.
Recently made the switch from Edge myself. Depends on what you'd like to be able to do.
Here's what I have installed:
Sorry, but people use edge?
I tried to like it basically since its inception. It helped that Microsoft is essentially paying people to do it (part of Bing rewards) and the add-on library is growing. It performs better than other browsers on devices with limited RAM and it works great with touch. I ended up switching because I was just tired of it feeling like a perpetual beta with occasional mis-rendered sites and random crashes. I think when it is mature it will be a good browser. They also just announced a switch to the rendering engine that chrome uses, so that should help (though people say it gives more power to Google within the internet).
Not an extension, but if you're interested in theming things, check out the /r/firefoxcss. You can actually theme firefox to look like nearly anything, personally I use the material firefox theme, but there are tons of other themes and UI tweaks that are cool and useful.
Can I use it to set the background to the bookmarks bar and tabs bar to a particular image?
Sounds cool! I'm looking for tweaks like that as well as extensions so that's fine.
I am a moron. I was reading this thread thinking "oh there's a lot of Tildes extensions, it must be popular outside of T-
...
Oh. I'm reading this thread ON Tildes."
I need more sleep.
The list of extensions mentioned here is already pretty comprehensive as I'm kind of late to the party but a few I haven’t seen mentioned which I find, maybe not essential, but pretty handy are:
I use these add-ons:
My issue with dark reader is the slowdown of sites, unfortunately