Best and free browser extensions to improve privacy and web experience in 2021 | Hacker News Reader

Best and free browser extensions to improve privacy and web experience in 2021

guillaumehr.medium.com

10 pointsGuillaumeHr16 comments

1. uBlock Origin is an essential addon.

2. Ninja Cookie - Cookie banners and other annoyances can be blocked with uBlock Origin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TvCGWwQr5o

3. Lastpass - Use your browser's built in manager. Chrome has a custom sync password and Firefox has a master password option. One less extension.

4. HTTPs everywhere can be avoided if you use Brave, as it automatically upgrades to HTTPs when available. You can set dom.security.https_only_mode to true in Firefox for a https only browsing experience.

5. Decentraleyes - Not that useful as it doesn't contain too many cached resources. Use LocalCDN if absolutely insist on using something similar.

6. Nimbus Screenshot - Screenity (https://github.com/alyssaxuu/screenity) is open source and much better.

The more extensions you install, the more people you are trusting not to sell out. Most of these extensions request access to all sites (passwords, cookies, browsing history). Try to keep the number of extensions as low as possible.

Productivity extensions usually lead to more wastage of time. I do not recommend anything. Use whatever you like.

From a comment I noted down some time ago where the user provided a comparison between Decentraleyes and LocalCDN:

- Decentraleyes has the advantage of being a "recommended" webextension which "undergoes a thorough technical security review to ensure it adheres to Mozilla’s add-on policies."

- Decentraleyes' has public ownership; Thomas Reintjes.

- Decentraleyes' last commit and last activity by the maintainer was 4 months ago; there are 78 open issues, and 9 merge requests with no indication of being merged in anytime soon. So I assume

- LocalCDN was forked because Decentraleyes actually appears stale which is unfortunate.

- LocalCDN doesn't have public ownership.

- LocalCDN isn't a recommended webextension and thus updates won't undergo "thorough technical security reviews."

- LocalCDN does support more assets/CDNs (which increases privacy beyond Decentraleyes) and will support more.

- LocalCDN has not slipped a new permission in. Compare LocalCDN's manifest.json with Decentraleyes'.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/comments/fc05uh/comm...

Public ownership meaning open source?

Source for localCDN - https://codeberg.org/nobody/LocalCDN

LocalCDN's developer is extremely pro-privacy. The extension collects nothing. Privacy policy is one sentence.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/localcdn-fork... https://www.localcdn.org/privacy.

Interesting, maybe the Reddit user got it wrong or perhaps it's been updated since they wrote the comparison.

It's been the same since the extension started being developed.

Reddit comments are mostly the same info being spread again. One redditor must have posted wrong info and other users spread the same thing. Never trust them blindly.

Very surprised to see Grammarly on a privacy oriented list. Aren't they shipping off everything you type to their servers?

I feel like maybe the title means "improve privacy" and "improve web experiance" as a mixed list. As in, each item will be one, not both. It's a very strange list/mix up, and in my opinion a poor article.

Grammarly would be awful for privacy. As would LastPass and EverNote.

I felt like this article was pretty low effort for sure. I didn't see anything close to an objective process for determining the best extensions and add-ons.

I'm curious why you say LastPass is awful from a privacy perspective?

Is it because you send your passwords to a service controlled by a 3rd party? Something more dubious?

Would you say the same about Bitwarden if you were hosting it yourself? Or the built-in browser manager (with syncing disabled)?

Yeah they're basically a data miner...

Any browser extension can at any time be hacked by, or sold to, malicious actors that will make your computer theirs.

If you wouldn't run a random executable from the internet to see "times around the world" don't get an extension to do it. It's the same risk.

That is not true at all. Browser extensions are written in JavaScript, so the source code can be inspected before installation or at runtime (Debuggers are present in major browsers). It might be the same as running a script or binary without looking at it first but it's not the same as just running a compiled proprietary binary.

Do you analyse the code in your browser extensions every day?

Also, this is likely far beyond the capabilities of the average computer user anyway.

In Firefox, extensions with the "Recommended" label have to go through code review with each update[1], and incidentally for a "times around the world" extension, there is FoxClocks with the "Recommended" label[2].

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[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-on-badges#w_recomme...

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxclocks/

Chrome and others are cracking down on the security issues. For one, whenever an extension’s permissions change in Chrome, the extension is (silently) disabled. Also, in manifest v3 externally downloaded JavaScript is not allowed at all.

Claiming 'extensions to improve privacy' and then recommending things like Bitly is questionable...

At least uBlock Origin is first.

Nice to compare this with the recent article showing 'the great suspender' extension's new maintainer was likely acting maliciously.

Extensions are debt and risk.

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