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.
- For Instagram - unmuting videos + setting their default volume
- For YouTube - disabling the subtitles/captions + disabling “autoplay next” for playlists + disabling autoplay of channels homepage video
- a way to disable specific keyboard shortcuts (you need to manually add the code as a new script). I use
/^(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.
- a way to disable specific keyboard shortcuts (you need to manually add the code as a new script). I use
- Note that, at least for Violentmonkey, if the userscript doesn’t have the “://” part of the url in the @match line then you need to add it in the userscript settings after installing the script (for example, if the @match line of the script only has
*.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.
Aside from the standard one’s I see:
Streaming enhanced: Netflix Disney+ Prime VideoAutomatically skip Ads, Intros, Credits and add Speed Control, etc. on Netflix, Prime video, Disney+, Crunchyroll and HBO max.
Haven’t seen anyone mention Decentraleyes yet. Serves CDN assets locally to avoid CDNs as a vector for tracking or fingerprinting.
Removed by mod
- Augmented Steam - sales on other platforms and whatnot
- BetterTV - emojis and whatnot on Twitch and YouTube
- Bitwarden
- Easy Container Shortcuts - makes container tabs nice to work with
- Multi-Account containers
- Steam Economy Enhancer - installed w/ Violentmonkey script manager; bulk sell Steam trading cards
And of course uBlock Origin. :)
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Ublock Origin: No brainer. You can block just about every intrusive component of the modern internet with just this.
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Stylus: Write CSS themes for websites
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User-Agent Manager: For compatibility purposes, switch your user-agent to chromium on some websites
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Libredirect
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ClearURLs: Copy links without tracking or affiliation
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Dark Reader: Dark mode everywhere
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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?
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Ublock origin, Sponsor block, and NoScript
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.
deleted by creator
I use these ones frequently:
- Quick Currency Converter - I’m interested in a better currency converter, its UI is not nice, but otherwise usable, and I couldn’t find a better one
- Open Page in Private Window - Adds button to rightclick menu
- Want My RSS - RSS button in the url bar
- Viewhance - better image viewer, zoom with scroll wheel, etc
- TWP - Translate Web Pages - Like the built in translator, but online only, works with more languages, translate selection in rightclick menu
- PersistentPin - I don’t know why FF forgets pinned pages, but this solves that
Some of my picks to add to all other comments
- Gesturefy: Mouse gesture addon. It can also run custom javascript. For example I have a script that makes copying text, links, buttons easier.
- Imagus mod: Hover zoom addon with up-to-date sieves that actually work. The sieve team is quite good.
- BetterViewer: Image viewer although some buttons don’t work on firefox.
- Fastforward: circumvents annoying link shorteners
- Distill: Monitor webpage or feed for changes
I also have many ***monkey and stylus scripts.
Sorry to necro, but have you found/made a working Imagus sieve for Lemmy? I’ve been trying without luck for months.
Sorry I don’t have one but I’m guessing it wouldn’t be very simple as there are so many lemmy websites.
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.
For me, it’s many of the ones people have already said, plus:
- StreetPass (seriously cool - collects the mastodon profile of any website you visit where someone has set up the special link to their profile)
- Video Speed Controller (gives you fine-grained control over video speed, e.g. watching video at 2.6x speed)
- Privacy redirect (automatically redirects to various services, e.g. from Twitter to Nitter - can select a random instance each time)
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.
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.Apart from what everyone already posted:
- Boring RSS - displays an rss icon in address bar with the rss feeds from the current page’s head tag - the cool thing is that unlike other addons like this, this one has only the activeTab permission, rather than “access your data for all sites” - https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/boring-rss
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uBlacklist - hides some pages from search engine search results (I use it to hide reddit) - https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
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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 😂
