I just moved to Firefox and was wondering what extensions/themes people use and what’s reccomended
Also good just as a general post for all good Firefox Extensions & Themes ect.
Thanks!
- ublock origin (not just ublock)
- bitwarden as password manager
- Bypass Paywalls https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean
Bypass firewalls clean is the GOAT.
Some extensions used by me:
- uBlock Origin
- Firefox Translations (works on-device)
- LibRedirect (redirects from certain sites (like youtube) to their frontends (like invidious))
For android I also use
Android PDF.js, to view pdf files on mobile.Thanks for Firefox Translations, I’ve been looking for such extension for a while.
on firefox nightly on android, I think pdf.js is built-in because I can view PDFs without having that extension.
Dark reader is a good one. It alters websites so they’re dark mode, even if they don’t officially support.
As an avid dark mode user, trying this has changed my life while breefly on random webites
Seconded! Just, be sure to adjust the settings if a site gives you trouble. Super helpful most of the time, but every once in a while the default makes modals invisible. 😅
uBlock Origin is a must for ad blocking. Anything else is just extra flavour. I like SponserBlock and Return YT Dislikes.
uBlock Origin is just required for me to block ads and other annoyances. Generally I also use it to block the annoying cookie popups instead of clicking any of their buttons instead of opting for a different extension, like I don’t care about cookies.
I also almost always have Tree-Style Tab, though I’ve found that it can cause Firefox to be non-performant on memory-constrained devices. This extension gives you a tab sidebar (using a similar interface element like the bookmarks sidebar) that organizes your tabs in a tree. I will often have hundreds of tabs open normally, and this makes them more manageable, as I middle-click everything to open things in a new tab, particularly when I’m researching. It gives a nice rudimentary tree view of what content related to what, like if I’m on a Wikipedia dive or TV Tropes dive.
I also usually have Tampermonkey, as I usually want to make a website more accessible. A lot of the time, it’s simply so I can autofill usernames in a text box, because the website might have the login flow split between pages, and Firefox does not recognize or allow me to select an autofill the username for me. Other times, it’s to automatically click through that annoying Microsoft login flow “Keep me signed in? (Don’t ask as often)”.
For watching YouTube, I use the SponsorBlock addon, because sponsored segments have become very annoying, though some creators have been able to make them actually fulfilling to watch.
On Android Firefox, I also get Disable Page Visibility API. This allows me to use YouTube in Firefox and even background the app and listen to music that way. Plus, with uBlock Origin, I am also able to block ads. I also sometimes install this on different profiles for situations where I believe the web app may try to detect my visibility, such as an online coding test for job opportunities where it will not want me to change windows to look up answers or type code into a compiler (this saved me during a C++ multiple choice exam which asked many times “Which of these is invalid C++?” and “What is the output of [this complicated code block]?”).
The below is for my work computers only, because I generally don’t need them otherwise.
I will additionally have Firefox Multi-Account Containers and couple that with Simple Tab Groups as I have 6 logins, with one particular site requiring 3 of those logins. I essentially configure the URLs I need to be in certain groups, define one container for each, and then have a couple of default tab groups set as sticky groups that will allow all containers to stay as those containers so I can use multiple sites side-by-side. The interaction with Tree-Style Tab can be a bit janky, especially when configuring new catch tab regular expressions, but usually disabling and re-enabling both Tree-Style Tab and Simple Tab Groups will fix that. Mostly I do this, because my company refuses to fix their SSO breaking due to weird cookie issues, and it’s pretty nice to be able to clear cookies for a particular tab group easily.
To clear cookies, and because I do that very often, I use Cookie Quick Manager. I can clear a tab group’s entire cookie set by having a tab selected in that tab group, then using “Delete current Context Cookies” and usually that will fix my login issues, and also keep my logins to other sites. For my personal use, I generally don’t need to clear cookies, or using a private window, clearing per-site via the web console, or clearing in settings is good enough.
Since I do a bit of web troubleshooting, Modify Header Value is pretty nice. I can call API endpoints that require a subscription key from my browser, even using the web console, and I don’t need to worry about figuring out if my headers are correct. I can also get my team to get this add-on so they can do their basic troubleshooting. For my personal computer, I’m much more free to create ad-hoc scripts to test things that I can save somewhere, as sending others scripts in my organization also comes with implicit hours of training and coaching on how to use them (and our leadership has been very sensitive to explicit training hours to get everyone up to speed).
Finally, User-Agent Switcher and Manager for the sites that are built for Chrome, but have worse performance or broken features on Firefox, yet they work fine when Firefox sends them a Chrome user agent. Thankfully, I rarely have a use for this on my personal computer.
So diabling the page visibility API would allow to switch tabs in those cases ? Glad to know 😊
If you use youtube a lot, Return YouTube Dislike, SponsorBlock & uBlock Origin. uBlock is still blocking ads on youtube.
On top of those I also use:
- pockettube: allows you to manage your subscriptions into categories (e.g. Music, Video Editing, News, Design Tutorials, etc.) and automatically creates playlists of new videos in each group.
- Enhancer for Youtube: adds convenient buttons, themes and loads of other features like automatically selecting your desired resolution.
uBlock, Bitwarden, Violentmonkey, Stylus are my top extensions.
Fwiw, this is the kind of thread I used to love The Other Site for. Glad to find one here!
Ooh, can we refer to The Other Site apologists as TOSers now? 🤩
- Inoreader
- Bitwarden
- uBlock
- Sponsorblock
- Dark Reader
- Font Changer
- Stylus
- Markdownload - web clipper
- Lasttab (Alt_Z back to last tab) A. Violentmonkey B. webcompat.com reporter C. Wikiwand D. YouTube Redux
ublock origin bitwarden cookie autodelete dark reader copy plain text mastodon or graze noscript sponsorblock and occasionally grammarly complete black theme
What does the Mastodon extension do?
Black theme? A resounding “yes!”
Firefox is great mostly on its own, and I only use two extensions:
- uBlock Origin: Enough said.
- Disable Javascript: Works great for getting around a lot of paywalls.
In case you don’t know, Ublock origin can block JavaScript per site basis. Just hit the “more v” at the bottom
I did not know that. lol.
It’s not as easy to use as DJ’s on/off toggle, but definitely nice to have as an alternative.
Haven’t seen so far, so: ClearURLs
If you’re using uBlock Origin. You can use ClearURLs for uBo & Actually Legitimate URL Shortener Tool filter lists with AdGuard URL Tracking Protection. They work just has good.
i think adguard url tracking protection filter achieves the same thing on ublock origin but correct me if i am wrong
A few that no one has mentioned yet:
If you use Steam a lot:
What benefit does rejecting
image/webpgive?Many websites will serve you a WebP file instead of JPEG/PNG if you say that you can handle WebP. While WebP is generally an acceptable format for serving web content, it’s an annoying format for images that you actually want to save to disk/archive - see my comment here as to why. Even if WebP was a fine format, odds are you’re downloading a 2nd-generation lossy image converted from a JPEG/PNG, so it’s usually better to just get the source file instead.
Interesting. I’ve in the past specifically encoded images for a webpage I created to
.webpusing https://squoosh.app as I determined it visually looked best for the file size while also being supported by pretty much all modern browsers.And since none of the other modern image formats you’ve listed are widely supported by many modern browsers I will probably do the same again when I have to create another website with some images. But I would hope that other formats gain more traction in browsers so that I can use them in the future.
Yeah, for 1st-gen images WebP is okay as long as you’re working within the format’s restrictions, but websites are usually serving user-created images that were made as JPEG/PNG first, and converted to WebP second (incurring additional quality loss). If you’re making 1st-gen images to serve based on browser availability, AVIF will be a much better option than WebP in terms of quality. AVIF has poor decoding speed, but I don’t know if it’s much poorer than WebP. If the politics surrounding JPEG XL get resolved and it gets put back into browsers, JPEG XL will be the best format to use for everything except for:
Single-core speed: JPEG beats it easily here. JPEG isn’t parallelized though, so if you have >=4 cores JPEG-XL starts winning for decoding speed. It’s worth considering that bandwidth/downloading is part of the image rendering lifecycle, so JPEG-XL’s smaller images sort of counteract this speed in that way.
Animated images: AVIF is a bit better here due to it being based on a proper video codec.
Very low quality images: AVIF gives slightly better results here. With JPEG XL’s dominance across medium->high quality images, this is largely not worth worrying about on a case-by-case basis unless you know you’re going to be making a lot of low-quality images. Also, due to how filesizes work, better compression at low filesizes is really not that important. It’s better to save 30% filesize on a 500kB image than a 5kB image, in aggregate.
Thanks for explaining this, I feel like I already learned more on lemmy than I ever did on reddit now!
I’ll keep this in mind the next time I want to optimize images on a website.
Dark Reader is one of my must haves. Turns dark mode on for every site. If a particular site already has its own native dark mode you can turn the extension off for just that site. Not perfect in all cases but works beautifully for most pages you view.
EDIT: Tap To Tab is really good if you are using a laptop without a mouse. Just double tap the trackpad to open a link in a new tab.
To add to this, there’s also a setting to detect native dark themes on websites so it will automatically disable itself on those sites. It’s a great add on.
A few I have but haven’t seen:
- SVG Export
- Chameleon
- Behind The Overlay Revival
- JPEG XL viewer
- PassLok Image Steganography, which works:
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