Ublock Origin is an obvious one, but I also can’t stand not having Foxy Gestures anymore. It adds customizable mouse gestures, so you can set it up to have easy swipes to go back a page, reload a page, close a tab, etc, and it feels wonderful and smooth to use compared to just using the traditional buttons to do everything. Honestly it’s kinda wild to me that this isn’t more popular now that people are so used to phone gestures. It’s good for the same reasons!
Firefox Multi-Account Containers has to be one of my favorite extensions. Mixing work accounts and personal accounts in the same browser session but in different tabs has made my workflow much more efficient. You can force bind sites to a container so that you don’t accidentally use your personal account for anything workplace related.
This is has been so useful in my attempts to go FireFox full time. I always had Edge and Firefox on the work laptop to separate things when needed, but the containers completely eliminated that.
My one critique would be if the assigned links wouldn’t open an empty tab when that specific container opens.
Dark Reader, because dark mode rocks.
Count this as my vote as well. Take every other extension away (uBlock Origin excluded obv) but I simply can’t endure the eye-searing pain of the internet without Dark Reader.
The browsers have their own dark mode, in chrome://flags or edge://flags, but in my experience they don’t work as consistently, overall.
Yeah, you’re right. They try but it’s not the same.
Before Dark Reader I used to make custom dark theme CSS for all the sites that I frequented heavily and spent so much time tweaking things so it came out “mostly right”.
Dark Reader isn’t perfect all the time but the peace of mind it grants me is immeasurable:)
Wait, what? You can force any website to comply with your own CSS? How (apart from manual Inspector edits every time)?
Yeah, there are extensions that enable injecting custom CSS. I’m using Stylus in Chrome (switched to that from Stylish about two years ago) and essentially you need to override the native CSS with lots of !important style declarations. Basically like Inspect Element but will load every time once the relevant website(s) is done loading.
If the HTML classes and ids are straightforwards that’s fairly easy, like old.reddit for instance. But every time they change the classes you need to go in a manually tweak it. And once a site starts obfuscating their code it’s not worth the effort anymore.
But it’s possible and for a while I honed my meager CSS skills by doing my own bespoke stylesheets. :)
I shared one on reddit that replaces pictures of spiders with kittens and it was met with a pretty shocking amount of hatred and vitriol brought my way, so nervous to share it here. But still I thought it was nice.
I had a similar one but for the former president. I still have it installed and it always confuses me for a second until I remember it.
Yo could share a link that. I’d love to see it in action when a prowl the cesspool that is r/politics on Reddit. XD.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/make-firefox-kittens-again/
That’s the one. May your day be brighter with more kittens while doomscrolling the news.
Wait. No, share it. Please! 🥺
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/spiders-kittens-image-replacer/
here it is for firefox. I think there’s one for chrome and for edge too
Guys. It even works for Spider-Man.
Thanks for sharing. Just added it! lol
I really appreciate you!
I almost destroyed a phone once when I scrolled down to an unexpected spider image, my fight or flight response kicked in, and I threw the phone across the room. So this sounds amazing!!
If only mobile Firefox had even a little bit of extension support.
Man, fuck the haters. This sounds amazing and I’m seriously considering using it lol
Definetely libredirect. It redirects YouTube, Twitter, TikTok… requests to privacy friendly frontends.
I would like to add Indiewikibuddy. It’s basically a more fully featured version of the FandomDotCom features of Libredirect.
For example, you can set it to redirect from the Skyrim Fandom.com to the UESP.
Consent-O-Matic
Automatic handling of GDPR consent formsDuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials
I mostly use this for the email protection (highly recommended!)ScrollAnywhere
Drag scrollbar with middlemouse button anywhere on the page.ScrollAnywhere is amazing. I’ve used BetterMouse on Mac for several months now and have grown accustomed to scrolling by click-dragging. Really wish there was some sort of similar app for Windows and Linux, but unfortunately I’ve spent hours searching and haven’t found anything.
Consent-O-Matic is amazing, highly recommended.
uBlock Origin
PrivacyBadger
Return YouTube Dislike
SponsorBlock
Translate (Firefox doesnt have website translation as a native feature)from https://beehaw.org/comment/80030:
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…I just make sure to disable all the instances by esmailelbob since he’s a little homophobic shithead
What? …alright let’s check the link.
Esmail is actively forbidding members or supporters of the LGBTQIA+ community to use their services via a TOS document.
Oh.
When you’re so drenched in queerphobia that you explicitly forbid the use of your services to LGBTQIA+ people and their ‘supporters’. Asbolutely normal and totally not deranged behavior.
Regarding AMP: Do people hate AMP or just Google’s implementation/control of it? Because in theory everything AMP does is remove a lot of what gunks up websites these days. Anyone know if there’s a Whoogle-like software that lets you self-host AMP links?
I run Firefox
- AdNauseam (One step further than uBlock Origin, it actively clicks everything that missed my DNS blocks)
- Bitwarden
- Decentraleyes
- Enhance-O-Tron for Plex (For some reason some videos in my library have black bars hard coded into them. I could probably re-encode them to get rid of the bars, but this add-on just hides the bars at a button click. It’s only a problem for monitors wider than 16:9)
- Enhancer for Youtube ™ (Automatically expand the canvas out to the full screen and a bunch of other stuff.)
- Facebook Container (I don’t use facebook, but the containers are nice to keep shit separated)
- Keepa - Amazon Price Tracker
- NoScript
- Redirect AMP to HTML
- ShareX ( I have workflows that automatically store stuff into my nextcloud and setup share links)
- SponsorBlock for Youtube - Skip Sponsorships
- Stylus
I had stuff for Reddit… but since I’ve moved off the platform, that’s been nixed. And for those of you using the cookie accepting apps… Why not just block the element with uBlock?
So, let’s try to compile a list.
- “uBlock” does not need any kind of introduction. Most of the people who answered the thread use it anyway. But it is my favourite!
- “Language tool” to help me spell things properly, lol
- “I don’t care about cookies” to get rid of annoying GDPR-compliance banners
- “FoxyProxy” to easily switch between proxies
- “Vimium C” to navigate the web using vi-like shortcuts
- “SponsorBlock”. I don’t use YouTube as much nowadays but when I do, this add-on helps me skip in-video advertisements and irrelevant moments
- “Search by image”
- “Rikaichamp” is a great add-on for anyone who often needs to look up Japanese words
- “Runet Censorship Bypass” because censorship circumvention is not a crime in my country. Yet.
Honestly, I thought it will be shorter. It makes me appreciate the authors of all these add-ons even more. If it weren’t for their efforts, web browsing would be a much less enjoyable experience.
In case you didn’t know, the “I don’t care about cookies” extension was recently sold to Avast. I don’t know if anyone has seen them make any sketchy changes yet, but personally I didn’t want to trust them and uninstalled it
Oh, well, that’s too bad. Thank you for pointing this out!
Apparently, there is now a debloated fork “I still don’t care about cookies” but the last update was in February and the issues are all open.
Why fork?
This extension has been acquired by Avast and I simply don’t trust Avast with my data. Additionally, having it on Github allows us to improve the code and add support for websites faster.
https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Still-Dont-Care-About-Cookies
UPD: @nonsense@beehaw.org has mentioned a great alternative called Consent-O-Matic (MIT License)
So what would you recommend to replace it?
You could try Consent-O-Matic. That’s what I use. It also doesn’t simply agree to everything like the other one but chooses the most privacy-friendly option instead.
Currently I just deal with the banners (as annoying as they are) and shed a tear at the state of the modern internet.
Ublock Origin has annoyance filters that you can enable.
I’m using FF and I only have one extension, it’s ublock origin
- uBlock Origin
- Dark Reader
- Bypass Paywalls
- Decentraleyes
- Enhancer for YouTube
- Return YouTube Dislike
ublock origin and firefox enhanced tracking protection already does what Decentraleyes is supposed to do, so its not needed if you already use firefox and ublock origins.
also, try out following extwnsions too:
- firefox multi account containers
- sponsorblock for youtube
- localcdn
- ublock origin
- privacy badger
- decentraleyes
- clear URLs
- facebook container
- https everywhere
- firefox multi-account containers
- dictionary anywhere
Decentraleyes … Nice! Never seen that one! I always suspected hosted libraries and the such come at a costs (like jQuery etc…).
Decentraleyes was good but has been unmaintained for quite some time, I believe LocalCDN is the current replacement.
I’ve heard a lot about Decentraleyes but I don’t really understand how it works. What does it do? I’d love to add another privacy tool to my arsenal? :)
Tree Style Tabs for Firefox gets installed on every Desktop install I use.
Wow thank you. I had no idea this was a thing!
Haven’t been able to live without it for at least 15 years now. I remember years ago the switch to the ‘new’ addon system when Firefox had a major update. I stayed on the old Firefox until Tree Style Tab was ported to the new one.
- Blocking: uBlock Origin and uMatrix (unmaintained, but works. Vastly superior to the mobile-friendly uBo interface)
- Facebook Containers & Multi-Account Containers
- Clickbait Remover for YT: You know those dumb faces? This randomized the thumbnail and normalizes titles.
- LanguageTool: Grammarly, but multi-language, self-hostable and less shady
- KeepassXC: Links to my password manager
- better-history-ng: Makes Firefox history actually useful by using a calendar view. Disclaimer: I maintain that, but I only fixed the old non-ng version with minor changes, as it was unmaintained.
I use about twice as many, but those are my most important ones.
LanguageTool
I’ll have to look into that. I’ve always liked the idea of Grammarly, but it seemed like I was basically downloading a keylogger, which seemed… unwise, lol.
It’s nice, it has a free version that you can use hosted, or self-host. You can’t host the premium version yourself, though.
LanguageTool is super cool because you can run it locally! I love it because of that, alone.
Wow, I had no idea that kind of extension existed for YT. That would a must have for! Thank you!
Can y’all point me in the right direction on why grammarly is shady? Maybe that premium account was a bad idea, but I’ve loved it for the last few years to help me be a better writer.
Very creepy ToS: https://teddit.net/r/sysadmin/comments/izpazs/any_way_to_block_grammarly_in_every_shape_and/g6ke3hn/?context=3
That said, I’m not sure if it’s the same for the paid version (as I mainly use it to make fewer typos in reddit/lemmy posts, it’s not something I want to pay for :D)
I wish I could upvote this 2x. I’ll be trying some alternatives. I get they have to analyze the text to make suggestions, but then seriously, ditch the data.
I was lazy and clicked through with the “big, common name should be OK” thought. *I’ll take my sticker of shame on this one, and try to do better in the future.
I’d say mainly privacy concerns. Everything you type is sent to Grammarly servers. I’m not sure what is done with that data.
- JShelter actively fights fingerprinting.
- NoScript blocks by domain by default.
- uBlock Origin with cookie list to block ads, trackers, and hide cookie banners.
- DarkReader to help the eyes.
- Stylus to fix any CSS not fixed by the rest.
