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?
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 Google+1 for Consent-O-Matic.
Consent-O-Matic sounds really nice, thanks for sharing.
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Thank you for the list. Had a stupid solution for what you use Consent-O-Matic for, and LibRedirect closes a gap bugging me for a while. I had no chance to try Buster yet, but I’m so looking forward to let software solve something grinding my gears with things software can solve better than software thinks.
Buster is a twisted work of a twisted genius. it uses accessibility version of captcha, which is based on recorded speech that you’re supposed to listen to and transcribe. it “plays” the audio silently, and uses speech recognition software to solve it.
for extra twistiness, you can actually set it up to use Google’s own speech recognition API.
That’s a bit like shoving their annoying puzzles up their own
arseKI.
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Recently installed it. No “you wannna login on our shitty website” popups
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
Thanks for making this list! I haven’t heard of a bunch of these and will check them out.
Is the link to Recipe Filter broken? I’m interested in that but it seems to just be a link to a reddit user.
Yeah it’s what the creator put as the official website of the plugin for some reason. Check Recipe Filter on the Firefox plugin page, you should be able to find it; the icon is a green card/newspaper thingy.
Will do, thank you!
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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.
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Thanks for the info. Lots of other good input in there as well!
Yeah I dropped most of them and only use NoScript and uBlock Origin now.
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}
For searching web archives, there’s the Web Archives addon (GPLv3). It just opens a search page though, and doesn’t have the ability to automatically archive.
For userscripts I use Violentmonkey (MIT).
I’ll take a look at violentmonkey. Thanks for the pointer!
I usually have a browser without NoScript, though, since a few sites I visit breaks with it enabled.
Can’t praise uBlock Origin and Dark Reader enough, though. Also Privacy Badger/Possum and Decentraleyes (at least a few years ago).
I can second Firefox’s containers. That has been my favorite feature Mozilla has implemented in Firefox and used with an add-on, of which there are a few. I’ve been using Containerise.
What do you like about Containerise? I’ve only used the Mozilla developed add-on
The Mozilla add-on is adequate and honestly probably better than Containerise in terms of UX. Containerise is simpler with fewer features, which could be a plus or a minus. I primarily use the add-on to automatically open a domain in a specified container and not much else, so it works for me.
Thanks for that comparison!
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Redirector is pretty neat, I use it to redirect links from reddit to teddit. Hate how bandwidth intensive reddit is.
uBlock Origin and Sponsorblock
uBlock Origin, Bypass Paywalls Clean, Bitwarden, and SponsorBlock for YouTube are my favorite ones.
Sponsorblock really helps me, since I watch a lot of YT and even though I have Premium, I’m otherwise still getting ads
People also need to remember to open up uBlock Origin settings page:
- Check on the “I am an advanced user.”
- Check all of the optional filter lists in Filter tab of uBlock Origin.
- Enjoy the internet without any ads at all. I never get ads on YouTube after this.
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.
I definitely agree with SponsorBlock there when it’s on its default settings, however I find that lots of those issues are solvable by utilizing it’s pretty decent customizability. Being able to identify channels which have manageable sponsor spots and excluding them can limit lots of those issues and fine-tune what types of things get skipped automatically or manually can make it a lot more manageable and only auto-skipping the most egregious things.
Bad segments are definitely a problem. At least for the channels I watch, the sponsor segments tend to be well done, but for other categories there’s often weird segments. Manual skip is still quite useful though.
I have created a FOSS extension called SyncMarks to sync bookmarks and tabs. It’s working with Firefox, Edge and Chromium and also on Kiwi on Android. You can sync your bookmarks independent from the browser and cross-browser. For example from Firefox to Edge or Chrome.
As a backend I would recommend my small php script which you can selhost. You only need PHP and a database like SQLite or MySQL. As fallback you can use any WebDAV share.
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.
OMG I didn’t know I wanted this until I saw the demo!
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, Clear URLs, Bitwarden, Dark Reader and Redirector
You have got to use AdNauseum. It obsfuscates your browsing data, making it harder for companies to track you and give you targeted ads.
Nice, I heard about this awhile ago but never installed it. I love making large annoying companies spend more money for essentially no on-boarding. Also, it is a simple way to make my online identity just a tiny bit more obscure.
I’ll have to look into that. Between containers, NoScript and uBlock Origin I’m not sure where it fits in.
In addition to all good recommendations above, I also can recommend Vim Vixen or Vimium C.
These extensions enable you to control your browser with your keyboard with vim-like commands. If you are already using vim or want to use your keyboard more to comfortably navigate your system, it is a must-have :)
As a neovim user, I may need to try those out.
uMatrix, which lets me choose which kinds of content (cookies, scripts, etc) from which domains are allowed in my browser. Regrettably, it is no longer maintained. I wonder if there’s some alternative that is maintained?
Unfortunately the developer of NoScript couldn’t justify the time spent on uMatrix. I really liked it but dropped it when it’s maintenance was ended. I don’t know of a good replacement but NoScript technically can do what uMatrix did but the NoScript interface is not convenient.
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My favourites for Firefox:
- uBlock Origin
- Deadname Remover
- Bitwarden
- Return YouTube Dislike
- SponsorBlock
