Ask HN: What browser extensions are a must-have in 2021? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What browser extensions are a must-have in 2021?

I've had uBlock Origin and NoScript installed faithfully for the past few years at least...

Kind of annoying having to whitelist every website I visit on NoScript these days but worth it imho.

Just curious if there are any others out there I should check out.

> Kind of annoying having to whitelist every website I visit on NoScript these days but worth it imho

In case you didn't already know, uBO does integrate a script blocker, with the advantage over NoScript that it supports per-site rules. I wrote a Twitter thread about this as an introduction a while ago: <https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/1379819815657996290>.

Also, a negative interference when using another script blocker extension along uBO is that these can prevent uBO from redirecting blocked resources to local neutered ones[1], beside making managing rules more complicated since the ruleset of two extensions have to be investigated when trying to unbreak a site.

* * *

[1] Redirecting to neutered local resources is useful to prevent site breakage and also to defuse anti-content blocker mechanisms.

I just want to say thank you for your amazing work.

uBlock origin in "Medium mode" does most of what you're hoping to get out of NoScript. Enabling it is basically just turning on advanced mode and setting 2 rules to block 3rd party scripts and rules - https://github.com/gorhill/ublock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium...

I combo it with Decentraleyes to get rid of most CDN (tracking) traffic.

Thanks for all your work and troubles over the years.

I wanna thank you for blocking ads on each newssite pornsite and pirate movie site i visited, uBlock Origin is a gift that keeps on giving haha.

My de-facto set of extensions:

- uBlock Origin

- Cookie AutoDelete

- "I Don't Care About Cookies" (It auto-OKs cookie consent banners)

- Archive.org's Wayback Machine (A must have in this era of link rot)

Optional:

- Tablist (easily lets me copy out all the URLs of open tabs for 'later')

- User Agent Switcher (Needed less these days, but useful for exploring the DOM of mobile versions of sites)

Additionally, I have written a launcher for Chrome that creates shortcuts for Chrome with the --user-data-dir parameter[1] to enable me to have 100% isolated browser identities. I create and tear these down on regular basis. I started doing this, when I realised that multiple Incognito mode sessions running simultaneously actually share the same cookies and local storage.

---

[1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/u...

Your custom launcher is basically the manual version of using Multi-Account Containers and Temporary Containers for Firefox by the way.

Oh interesting to know!

They do not cover the same use case. If you have 80 tabs each for 3 different topics, you end up managing 240 tabs. It's sometimes more manageable to split this off into entirely different browser profiles (or browsers, even).

> If you have 80 tabs each for 3 different topics, you end up managing 210 tabs

Is this a typo (80 x 3 = 240), or are you suggesting 30 tabs are deduplicated in some capacity?

It was a typo, thanks for pointing it out

You can use Tree Style Tab or similar (AFAIR there are a few different extensions with different tradeoffs for similar features).

I already do. It makes the problem somewhat more manageable.

Cookie AutoDelete is a bad choice. The idea of it sounds good, but websites nowadays have lots of APIs to store information in your device, and Cookie AutoDelete doesn't delete all of them, which renders it completely pointless in my opinion.

Eventually what I did was configure my browser so it removes all cookies every time I quit it, which is more or less once a day. Also, I blocked third party cookies.

https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete/wiki/...

You can check the Application -> Storage tab of developer options and you will see that it does not remove everything.

Deletes everything for me. Maybe you haven't configured it correctly

I make chrome only keep a few whitelisted cookies every time I close and disable 3rd party cookies. I think this system is close to temporary container in Firefox.

I use Edge btw, and it has few great features. There is a collection feature with a toolbar button. It can saves all the opened tabs for later use, no memory hogging and need to use 3rd party extension. Few other toolbar buttons which provides faster experience than chrome.

You can check out Tab Stash. It is a great add on to stash your tabs for later use.

uBlock has a cookie list for consent banners

I don't care about cookies also publishes one that can be used by uBlock - https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/abp/

sadly this breaks a few sites since it doesnt auto accept cookies but rather hides the banner as far as i know

Used to use Archive.org's own extension, but I encountered way too many false positives over time to continue using it. I'd recommend One-click Wayback instead - no automatic activation.

Thanks so much for that. I had the same problem and got so infuriated with their extension that I couldn’t continue to use it. A cursory search didn’t turn up anything that seemed polished or reputable, so nice to finally find a recommended alternative.

You can switch user agents in chrome developer tools now - no need for an extension [1]. I find device mode [2] even better for your use case.

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/device-mode/overr...

[2] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/device-mode/

I have almost the same list, plus I recommend a web browser macro recorder like imacros, uivision or selenium ide.

Which one you prefer depends on your taste. They are great for casual and quick form filling and testing, and save me from too much typing and clicking.

Video Speed Controller lets you speed up any HTML5 video. No more sitting through videos at 1x speed!

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-contro...

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/videospeed/

Even for a site like YouTube that has built-in speed control settings, it's still useful since (1) you can make the speed exceed 2x and (2) you can use keyboard shortcuts to tune the speed easily.

Video Speed Controller was an absolute revolution for me. No more switching tabs because the video is too slow.

Wow thanks! This is exactly what I need thanks to constant phone notifications which have reduced my attention span to.... that of something with a small attention span!

This extension is amazing if you have to do mandatory training videos at work and they speak at a snails pace.

Multiple tabs of videos playing on 4x speed. We did speedrunning contests on these mandatory training videos in my previous company. Good times.

Can I now has 4x speedup for meetings?

Sure. You now have time for 4x more meetings! Enjoy!

Enhancer for YouTube has a feature like this. Love that extension

Not just any videos. Now I even speed up movies on netflix. That's why I have to watch them on laptop now, as I can't speed them up on TV.

While I do use video speed controller as well, just for the record - there are shortcuts for video speed manipulation for YouTube:

> Speed up the video playback rate. < Slow down the video playback rate.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7631406?hl=en

Good to see you can adjust by intervals like 0.10, YouTube's default increments of strictly 0.25 make it impossible to watch most videos at a reasonable pace.

I stopped trying to whitelist sites. Now I just use cookie autodelete and container tabs.

Full list:

- Joplin web clipper

- BitWarden

- Firefox containers

- Containerise (choose tab container based on domain name or url regex)

- Cookie autodelete (in case I ever accidentally log into something in the wrong container, this cleans it up)

I also modify the search bar so it only suggests locations from my bookmarks, and I use separate bookmarks for each account, eg:

- gmail [user@gmail.com]

- gmail [other@work.com]

- aws console [prod@work]

- aws console [me@personal]

- github [work]

- github [personal]

I type "gmail work", hit return and Firefox opens it in the correct container tab, already logged in. (Honestly, who uses bookmarks any more? They just turn into a bloated to-do list, hundreds of links you'll forget about until one day you try them and the domain no longer exists)

Make Google results suck less with Greasemonkey and a script that blocks junk domains (I maintain my own block list). And I have a junk Google account just for random searches etc, and I leave that logged into the "default" container tab, so I'm not plagued by Google cookie / T&C pop-ups.

Other Greasemonkey scripts, eg: make Reddit suck less by using old.reddit.com.

I also log into Firefox and sync this stuff across all of my browsers. Unfortunately the setting per addon do not sync so I always export text configs to a Syncthing directory any time I make a change (eg: update containerise rules, blocklists, cookie autodelete settings)

> Honestly, who uses bookmarks any more? They just turn into a bloated to-do list, hundreds of links you'll forget about until one day you try them and the domain no longer exists

Use a service like pinboard and they instead turn into a searchable archive of things you like, archived so that they don't disappear/change. Sorta like a curated personal search engine.

I've always thought it a shame how primitive the history and bookmarks are in Firefox. They don't seem to have evolved at all in 20 years apart from the ability to sync them across devices.

> I've always thought it a shame how primitive the history and bookmarks are in Firefox.

While I agree with you, since you added "in Firefox", actually Firefox lets me do more with my bookmarks than Chrome.

Fair point, I didn't mean to disparage Firefox it's just the only one I've ever used.

Firefox fixed this for you. They bought pocket and turned it into a paid product.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/news/mozilla-acquires-po...

In Firefox I feel I can probably do away with bookmarks because of the address bar autocompletion. I think they used to call it the awesome bar, but I haven't heard that term for many years.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet...

What's this pinboard service you mention?

https://pinboard.in/

It's run by idlewords here on HN, who also gives great talks and writes on https://idlewords.com/

I want an offline solution for this. What's the point of saving content from the Internet on the same Internet? You lose your connection and immediately lose access to all the saved content.

So, does anyone know of any solution like this, but running locally instead? I tried Recoll, and both the FF extension and the query engine were... unpolished, to say the least...

EDIT: mentioned in another comment Web Clipper + Joplin looks really nice!

Raindrop.io and Pocket can save articles on the Premium plan and Raindrop does it automatically it seems, it does have a few limits though.

Wallabag costs money but you can self host it. I heard it's good!

Thank you! For anyone else wondering: Raindrop costs 35 euro per year (but has a limited free version) and Wallabag starts from 3 euro per year, and has options for 5 and 25 euro, but I'm not sure if this influences functionality or is simply a way of donating money to the project.

I mean I know AlternativeTo lists it as paid.

I would personally recommend

https://github.com/rhizome-conifer/conifer

The intent is a webrecorder for the internet.

It records all js libraries, loads videos, and all else.

Once stored, you can review a snapshot at that point in time.

They have a service option, webrecorder.io, but this one let's you store directly locally.

I'd recommend [SingleFile](https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile) for saving web pages, [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/) for taking notes and [Syncthing](https://syncthing.net/) for syncing between devices. Combining these can let you access any saved pages or notes on any device.

> (Honestly, who uses bookmarks any more? They just turn into a bloated to-do list, hundreds of links you'll forget about until one day you try them and the domain no longer exists)

I still do but I absolutely agree with you. I'm still looking for a replacement though.

Containerise is a must when using containers in FF, it's just so much more ergonomic to use. This should eventually be included within FF.

> I type "gmail work", hit return and Firefox opens it in the correct container tab, already logged in. (Honestly, who uses bookmarks any more? They just turn into a bloated to-do list, hundreds of links you'll forget about until one day you try them and the domain no longer exists)

Do you just have a google container, or have you managed to make it so that gmail can only be opened in a "personal" and "work" context and bookmarks open it in the right tab? That's been my big frustration with using container tabs to seperate purposes/accounts like this.

I have containers for personal, projects, shopping and a bunch more. Within work I have several containers (prod, test, dev) as there are different accounts for those - AWS for example

Are you manually allocating your work gmail to one container and personal gmail to another, or are you only logging into one at a time, or have you managed to automate this somehow?

It's automated via the containerise addon, which can match url regexes. Google Regex, which works for a bunch of G-suite stuff (Gmail, Docs etc)

@.*\.google\.com.*username@gmail\.com.*$

A bookmark link for Gmail that works with that regex would be:

https://mail google.com/u/?authuser=username@gmail.com

Edit: What? Of fuck off HN, how the fuck are you supposed to post unformatted text? Ok, got it. I'm not translating the horrible YouTube url though.

> Honestly, who uses bookmarks any more? They just turn into a bloated to-do list, hundreds of links you'll forget about until one day you try them and the domain no longer exists

Exactly! I use tabs for that very thing. I have over four hundred tabs open in multiple windows, and counting!

(Please send help.)

Ha, my co-workers choke every time I share my screen and they see my tabs. Then they learn that they’re just seeing one window out of twelve.

oh my god im so glad im not the only one. my ADHD makes this so bad

I have 86 tabs open in Firefox in my phone right now

Mine started to show infinity now.

Sponsorblock for Youtube: users mark segments of videos that have sponsored content, and the extension skips over them. It also skips past introductions and interaction reminders.

For desktop users I suggestion trying FreeTube which also has this feature

https://freetubeapp.io/#download

I kind of object to this because it's directly messing with creators' efforts. Obviously I'm not telling people not to use it, but I think it's worth thinking about the channels/creators you enjoy - especially if they've been demonetized by Youtube.

The extension actually lets you customize the behavior based on the type of video segment. In your case you could configure it to not skip sponsored segments but skip other segments e.g. the non-music parts of music videos.

I'm actually curious about this since I've never uploaded to youtube myself. Do the creators get statistics on segments that are commonly skipped, or is all information like that hidden?

They know which parts people skip, the analytics is quite granular and viewable in their dashboards.

Youtube already has ads. Yes, Youtube's revenue model is atrocious for creators, but running your own ads on top of their ads is really not the solution. LinusTechTips is the most egregious example of that. After sitting through two Youtube ads, I have to look at their preroll and postroll for sponsorships, as well as a midroll for another sponsor or their merch store. It just gets tiring after a while. I can't imagine how people who pay for Youtube Premium must feel.

I don't know, I look at it almost exactly in the opposite way. I used to block Youtube ads with uBlock and now use Youtube Premium, and ads that are baked into videos by creators themselves don't bother me.

The ads that are baked into the video don't have tracking code because they're just part of the video file, they aren't an extra javascript burden, often the sound/transition is far better and not so jarring-- really they're IMHO the least "bad" form of ads- better than the alternatives in almost every way- and often these ads are more relevant to the content and probably support the creator well.

I would much rather have a creator do sponsor spots in their video content than ever get served a javascript ad from some ad company.

How does blocking such an in-video ad hurt the creator? If there's no JavaScript, there's presumably no way of tracking "views", right?

It seems like the only harm is that I won't see/click the ad. But I think anyone who runs an ad-blocker is already the sort of person who won't click ads. Even if someone advertises something I'm super excited by, I'll want to take a few days to research the product - and I'm not going to go dig up the sponsored link when I decide to buy in.

I'm not actually saying that I agree that it hurts the creator, just listing the reasons that I don't bother blocking them. I am not necessarily against the idea of sponsorblock- I hate all advertising in general (and even despite this I still fall for ads I do see and check products out...maybe that makes me hate them even more) it's just that in-video ads are the kind of ads I am least inclined to go out of my way to remove or skip.

And, I can't tell you what the difference is- it seems it would be the same- but sponsor spots in audio-only podcasts bother me more than ones in videos. Maybe it's the length. The majority of the content I watch keeps sponsor stuff short- but the podcasts I listen to make a 5-10 minute infomercial out of them, so I do skip them more often in podcasts

As far as whether I think there's any harm to creators from skipping sponsored spots, it's possible that whatever statistics/analysis creators have access to on the platform might inform what they're able to tell their sponsors as far as views/etc. - but I don't know to what extent that goes

>I would much rather have a creator do sponsor spots in their video content than ever get served a javascript ad from some ad company.

Me too, I just think it's gotta be an either or.

I think that's ideal, but will never happen, because aside from creators making money, YouTube wants to make money, and they won't make anything on ads built into the video

Yeah at some point, they're running more ads for sponsors because they want more money. Add another sponsor? Increase pay for their employees, buy new equipment etc. But at what point do you say "nah u don't want to support you THAT much, I won't watch the sponsored video"? Like, YouTube already pays them from YouTube premium subscriptions, at what point is the creator now just being greedy?

Don’t most people just spam right arrow to skip through sponsor segments anyway? For me, sponsorblock just automates this process. As others mentioned, it’s pretty granule and has a lot of options for things like intros, intermissions, etc in addition to sponsor segments.

I mean, it only messes with the efforts of the advertisers, right? Not that they can detect how many views the sponsored block has. Ofc if this becomes too popular, the ad industry will eventually catch up, but this is long ways away imho.

Also "Youtube Video Skip Ad Trigger" is handy one for automatically pressing the "skip ad" button - so you don't have to!

If you use uBlock Origin, you shouldn't need it because prevents the ad from playing at all.

Hmm I def see ads on YouTube, is there maybe a setting I need to enable or ruleset? (I use the default )

https://youtube.com/premium

I use Firefox an uBlock origin and definitely don't see ads on YouTube. I don't have any other ad blocking extension installed.

+1 to Sponsorblock. It really improves Youtube.

I recently built a browser extension and a web app to keep track of job applications.

  - With the browser extension (for Chrome and Firefox) you can add jobs from any website with a single click and that job will show up on your special Kanban board. 

  - On the board you can add more information and keep track of your application through all the phases. You also get weekly reports with your progress.

If you are looking for a job give it a try :)

Link: https://profilehunt.net/job-application-tracker-web-extensio...

I think OP is asking for privacy related extensions but here’s a fun one that I use: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nicolas-cage/fjgbn...

It replaces every instance of “god” on your current web page with “Nicolas Cage.” Gets me every time.

I don't understand this. Why would you replace Nicolas Cage with Nicolas Cage?

Sounds like the plot for Face/Off sequel where Nicolas Cage swaps his face with himself, Nicolas Cage.

Reminds me of cloud to butt.

https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt

I don’t understand this. Why would you replace butt with butt?

Because there's no way that could ever go wrong...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28869819

* ublock origin - doesn't need introduction

* forget me not - cleans cookies

* stylus - some sites are too bright

* clearURLs - remove tracking from urls

* I don't care about cookies - also gets rid a lot of popup annoyances

* skip redirect - avoid going through 3rd party to get to a link

* redirector - redirect sites to nitter, teddit, bibliogram, etc

I also use firefox containers.

> redirector

seems to be out of date. a more up to date version would be "privacy redirect".

No, those two are not the same thing. Redirector can redirect anything based on regex, privacy redirect is for fixed services at the moment.

I only use extensions with low permissions:

* Twitter to Nitter https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nitter-redire...

* Remove YouTube Suggestions https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/remove-youtub...

* Reddit to Teddit https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reddit-to-ted...

I enable:

* strict tracking protection

* privacy.resistFingerprinting

* First party isolation

I'm considering using libreJS.

You could replace two of those extensions with Redirector: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/

That extension requires permission "Access your data for all websites". I prefer to avoid granting that permission.

I can't live without this one:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-a...

Blocks the "consent to cookies" modal sites are required to have thanks to some terrible legislation.

Nice extension. But I'd say that the legislation is alright, it's these sites that are terrible. They put these modals because they want to.

The legislation has the right heart, but its wording is problematic and leaves up too much on interpretation, so most sites who technically wouldn't need it just default to a cookie banner to be 'on the safe side'.

Combine that with the zealots (I've had an user complain about the absence of a cookie banner on a site that clearly did not need one), them potentially becoming a lawsuit initiator, and you got the mess you have now.

Writing good laws without unintended consequences is hard.

Yes. Moreover this law, while good intentioned, seems like a somewhat misplaced effort against tracking. Cookie tracking is easy to disable and not really worrysome. The elephant on the room is google play services tracking all android users with no way to disable it. Now, that should be forbidden by law.

GDPR's consent requirements are actually about tracking in general, regardless of the method you use to achieve it, not about cookies.

The wording of the GDPR is very clear: cookies required for essential functionality such as logging in or shopping carts do not require consent.

Not needed if you use uBlock Origin

That's not what I see. With uBlock Origin installed, if I visit news.bbc.co.uk, for example, I still get the accept cookies banner.

There are extra lists you need to enable. I believe the "annoyances" lists cover this.

Unmentioned so far:

* Form History Control (rip Lazarus Forms Recovery, Seth plz come back & open source it). https://stephanmahieu.github.io/fhc-home/Manual/manual/

* Multi-Account Containers in Firefox. Absolutely critical to mixing work/personal computing. I used to use profiles to split stuff up but harder to maintain. (oops already mentioned)

* React Developer Tools. Apollo Developer Tools. Instrumental to my development work.

* ViolentMonkey. Before Chrome finally blows up freedom & expression on the web: ViolentMonkey is a pretty good userscripting tool. https://violentmonkey.github.io/

* Open in Sci-hub. I came very close to weaping out loud when I found that these papers I have forever clicked on & wanted are easily within reach. I now have access to humankind's wisdom. https://roiarthurb.github.io/Side-Auto_Sci-Hub/

* Hypothesis. The greatest most pro-web tool humanity has ever imagined, by orders of magnitude. https://web.hypothes.is/start/

* Web Scrobbler. I love knowing what I listened to. Works great with usual suspects. So so results with individual online fm radio stations. https://web-scrobbler.com/

I really want to get good at a vim<->browser extension. Ideally just using a real vim session. I use Dark Reader all the time & it's amazing, just fantastic. I want a replacement for Share-a-holic that I trust, that let's me bookmark/send-to across multiple services (pocket, pinboard primarily); I don't trust share-a-holic. "Switch to audible tab" is useful in critical moments, which thankfully are not often. Extensions I'd like to find & get good at: semantic web extractors/breadcrumbers.

I've seen all of my used addons recommended by others but here's what hits it for me:

-SponsorBlock (incredible boost to Youtube tolerability)

-uBlock Origin (created and maintained by a Québecois!)

--Don't forget to addd annoyances and malware lists to configuration!

-Refined hacker news (small nice changes for the site).

-cookies auto-delete.

Refined Hacker News [0] author here, thanks for the mention :)

[0]: https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news

Another happy user checking in. Thanks for the plugin!

An iPad extension would be cool too :)

(like Refined Github https://github.com/refined-github/refined-github#install)

I have accumulated perhaps more than is healthy.

Some that didn't appear on this page (yet) are:

octotree - intercepts github (and ostensibly other repo site) pages and gives you a browseable file manager pop-out on the left. Once used, it's hard to live without.

behind the overlay - lets you hide (most) popups and overlays with ctrl-shift-x, which regrettably quickly becomes an instinctive reaction

jira assistant - nifty, if you spend a fair bit of time in jira

tabs outliner - can be handy for recovering large bits of your (crashed) browser history, though I find ctrl-shift-T gets me most of the way there these days.

+1 for Octotree and Tabs Outliner from me.

I've been trying out Tabs Outliner. It seems exactly like something I'd need, and even works for Vivaldi, but it's a bit overwhelming haha. It's also a shame that the dev disappeared and there's no Firefox extension

Over the past half dozen years I've found the developer fairly responsive, but we're in a catch-22 situation.

My interest (I want to delete the several hundreds of 'pages' of previous tab details in my history before I'd consider this something I'd pay for) and the developers interest (this is too hard to do for a non-paying customer) have been at odds.

Wait, they have? They haven't responded too any issues posted recently, and I heard from the guy who recommended this extension that you can't even pay for the premium anymore.

I used Octotree for a long time but switched to https://github.com/EnixCoda/Gitako because it’s open-source.

Thank you for the heads-up - I'll install and have a play. I'm not a power user, but it's such a useful tool even in basic explore mode. Ostensibly octotree works with BitBucket (at dayjob) but in practice I've never gotten that working. I note that Gitako has a FR open about 18 months that mentions supporting BB, but doesn't appear to be there yet.

Another unmentioned one that's handy for web development: Offline QR Code Generator (for Firefox; probably there is one for Chromium as well). It shows a popup with the QR code for current URL, which makes it easy to test the same page on a mobile device.

I think Chrome(probably Chromium as well) do that natively, i've seen a menu option to show a QR code for the current page.

I've never seen it in Chromium (on macos); I don't use Chrome.

Not sure about Chrome/Chromium but Edge has it.

Firefox has a 'send tab to device' feature if you are signed in.

Really useful!

I'm no fan of Firefox' accounts, so I can't use this, but the extension also allows me to open a website in e.g. Edge Beta on Android.

I stopped using NoScript because the micromanagement of domain names simply took too much time. I rely on Pi-hole to fill that gap somewhat.

To answer your question (Firefox on desktop and mobile):

- uBlock Origin

- Privacy Badger

- HTTPS Everywhere

- Enhancer for YouTube

- Multi-account Containers

- Owl

Also on Firefox. It appears that I'm not as privacy/security conscious as are most in this thread, but I heartily second HTTPS Everywhere.

However, the single Firefox extension that's indispensable to me is Tree Style Tabs. See: https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab.

Is it possible (for a Web page hoarder like me) to organize and access 500+ tabs across seven Firefox windows? You betcha it is, with Tree Style Tabs.

Newer versions of firefox and other major browsers have a HTTPS Only mode now, which removes the need for HTTPS Everywhere and it will be deprecated -> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/electronic-frontier-.... You can enable HTTPS Onlu mode on firefox under settings -> Privacy & Security

I've played with Tree Style Tabs, but it seems like there's some configuration required for the optimal result. So I ask: have you done any configuration changes to it?

Also a TST user. It take some getting used to, I don't think I'll ever go back to using horizontal tabs. It is very much functional out-of-the box and it comes with a lot of preferences to choose from. However for a cleaner interface you'll have to customize your UserChrome.css.

This is what I'm using right now - https://pastebin.com/bKHM8hp9

I edited userStyles.css to remove the browser tabs from the top of the browser so that only the tst tabs are visible, plus in the tst preferences I added some css to highlight certain tabs such as email and slack. I also added some styles for suspended tabs and removed the a scrollbars.

I change the theme and the opening tree behavior do it doesn't nest endlessly. I think I also put to open new tabs at the front of the children, so it is immediately preceding the parent. Just use it for a bit, the top tab bar is so silly.

I have custom css to hide the tab bar from the top.

I also shrink it down when the mouse isn't over it. See the screenshots for mouse out and mouse over look.

Mouse not over tree tabs: https://i.imgur.com/ikQhxTM.png Mouse over tree tabs: https://i.imgur.com/TyRds6V.png

Works well for me.

Could you please post your userChrome.css that you use to achieve this? Looks very neat to me, but I don't know how to configure it.

https://gist.github.com/stuartstein777/b7ebf62e3fd44f432b873...

In the same vein I'd recommend Sidebery https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery for tree style tabs.

It has more sane defaults, even some animations, very accessible customization (e.g. you can theme every bit of bar in extension settings, not needing to go to chrome.css). It's also can be used as a basic browser "window manager", given that you can't split window into panes, but you can have multiple tab groups in one window and quickly switch between them.

Can Sidebery import TreeStyleTabs tree data if I switch to it?

> to organize and access 500+ tabs across seven Firefox windows

What motherboard did you get to have one terabyte of RAM? :D

Don't need anywhere near that much. On this 2012 PC with 32GB of RAM I have 3300 tabs open in Chrome and 3100 in Firefox. Plenty of RAM left over for other things too. I use The Marvellous Suspender for Chrome and Auto Tab Discard for Firefox to keep the memory and CPU use down. Session Buddy for Chrome makes it easy to manage them. I don't have anything as good for Firefox though (I'm using Session Boss, but would like something better).

When ff is set to restore tabs on launch, it does not load them until you click on them. There are also extensions that allow you to unload tabs without closing them. I've never been a fan of bookmarks for whatever reason and tend to have many of the same tabs open for months at a time.

Ah, a fellow Tab Hoarder! I've been using Firefox quite a bit lately and I really like Tree Style Tabs

HTTPS Everywhere is going away next year. For more details see https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/09/https-actually-everywh...

Just in case you didn't know about this: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/10/privacy-badger-changin...

I remember finding out about it in a thread on reddit, they concluded that after this change there is no point in using privacybadger if you're already using ublock, for example.

These are not that well known, but I highly recommend them (Firefox):

* Bypass Paywalls Clean - the name says it all - https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clea...

* Web Archives - easy access to cached websites, also useful for paywalls and sites heavy in JS - https://github.com/dessant/web-archives

* Vimium - use keyboard for browsing - https://github.com/philc/vimium

* SponsorBlock for YouTube - skip in-video ads - https://sponsor.ajay.app/

* Old Reddit Redirect - use old reddit design - https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect

* Reddit Enhancement Suite - https://redditenhancementsuite.com/

How does 'bypass paywalls clean' differ from the 'original' one by github.com/iamadamdev?

Privacy

- uBlock Origin (block ads and trackers)

- Decentraleyes (locally emulate CDN)

- Privacy Badger (from EFF)

- AdNauseam (in conjunction with uBlock)

- Canvas Blocker (Fingerprint Protect)

- Privacy Redirects (redirect social media sites to their privacy friendly front ens, eg twitter --> nitter)

Other Privacy tools - Tracking Token Stripper (removes tracking part from URL)

- minerBlock (blocks miners from using your CPU for cryptos)

- WebRTC Leak Prevent

- Location Guard (spoof location, not very effective)

- Agentium (User Agent Switcher)

From Google - Google Analytics Opt-out Add-on

- IBA Opt-out

Convenience - Password Manager (I use Bitwarden)

- Dark Reader

- Save Webpages Offline As MHTML (saves as single file)

Not an extension

- In-built DNS-over-HTTPS (I use BlahDNS/NextDNS as additional layer for adblocking and privacy)

If you are not into whitelisting you'll hate uMatrix. But uMatrix is great.

uMatrix is also deprecated.

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uMatrix-issues/issues/291#is...

This is really sad. I hope somebody will take on its development!

uBlock Origin's advanced user mode does the same thing. Sometimes a bit more complicated (have to also add block rules), but I can see why he deprecated it. Why maintain two extensions that end up doing the same thing?

Firefox Multi-Account Containers and Temporary Containers are an ideal combo. By default, every tab opens in a new temporary container. You can create named containers for (groups of) sites you frequently visit so you don't have to login each time. It's a bit hard to find: to pin a site to a container, visit it and then click the Multi-Account Container icon in the toolbar -> Always Open This Site In...

On Firefox for Keyboarders:

Fast Tab Switcher little used but absolute best Firefox extension for navigating tabs. It shows all tabs for all windows in one drop down accessible by a keyboard shortcut (I use ctrl-q in windows) Tabs are filtered as you type.Tabs can be quickly closed by ctrl-del in drop-down. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fast-tab-swit...

Vimium-FF Must have for keyboard navigation. Hit escape key and every link on page is navigable by a key sequence. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/

Web Search Navigator.

Easy keyboard navigation of search results. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/web-search-na...

- Bitwarden - uBlock origin - Enhancer for Youtube - Joplin Web Clipper - Vimium, but I've configured it to disable vim key bindings, and just use ctrl-space (or ctrl-b for new window) to open a link or focus an input. Here's my Custom key mapping:

  unmapAll
  map <c-space> LinkHints.activateMode
  map <c-b> LinkHints.activateModeToOpenInNewTab

The line of defence - for that is what most extensions are used for - actually starts much earlier, in the router. Using iptables and ipset it blocks known nefarious network ranges. On that same router lives the DNS proxy which, fed using the same filter lists as used by blocking extensions, relegates unwanted domain names to a local address which serves nothing. Once past the router there are a few application proxies which take care of search (using the Searx meta-search engine, replies are proxied), Youtube (proxied through invidious), Twitter (proxied through nitter) and Reddit (libreddit - hardly ever used here). Then, on browsers:

- uBlock Origin blocks unwanted content

- Privacy Redirect redirects Youtube, Twitter and Reddit to the aforementioned local proxies

- Containers with Transitions (a forked version of Multi-Account Containers) is used to separate a number of well-known data-hoarding services (e.g. anything owned by AlphabetGoogle, anything owned by FaceMetaBook) by owner

- SwitchyOmega is used to choose one of several Tor instances in case I need to appear to come from a different IP address.

- IPFS Companion makes it easier to access ipfs:// and ipns:// links

- Open With to open links in other tools - this can be anything you like, I'm e.g. using this to mirror material likely to be censured, feed magnet: links to the server-resident Transmission daemon, command the local netcast (which is also called 'podcast') instance to create audio-only versions of material I want to listen to while working outside, etc.

All these are used on Firefox on Linux, some on Firefox on Android. I hardly ever use Chromium but for those times I do I have most of them installed there as well except for Containers with Transitions which is Firefox-only.

Lots of good extensions in this thread.

Here are some optional extensions I like:

- Twemex - https://twemex.app/ - Adds a really useful sidebar to Twitter.

- Recipe Filter - https://github.com/sean-public/RecipeFilter - Focuses recipes front and center on food blogs

- Notion Boost - https://gourav.io/notion-boost - Adds a lot of really nice features to Notion

- Tampermonkey - https://www.tampermonkey.net/ - Lets you create your own JS customizations on web pages without needing to make a whole browser extension.

I really wish it was far easier for everyday people to make their own personal browser extension-like functionality and share it with others. Extending the apps we use feels really empowering and can help people transition from helpless consumers of apps to authors of how their computer works. Here's an essay I like detailing this view:

https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2019/07/29/browser-extensions.h...

And while I'm here I'd also like to plug a service I wrote that lets you easily add paid features to extensions you develop:

https://extensionpay.com

I made it to use myself but lots of developers have found it useful in monetizing their extensions without ads or selling user data. And even to my surprise, users are actually willing to pay for browser extensions! The service has made devs over $13k since I launched earlier this year!

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc...

I made the recipe-filter extension you mentioned, which has the source available on GitHub at the link you gave and thus is trivial for others to fork, modify, install locally, and so on. All extensions wind up as an archive with JS that one could modify, but I've made this one especially transparent.

With your ExtensionPay, I could add a check to see if someone has a subscription for some new features I'm working on, but it feels like something's missing checking in that code into a public repo with no server necessary for the processing the extension requires. The trust is handled in the JS running on the users' browsers.

> As Mozilla recommends, it's better to focus on making a good product for the majority of users that won't hack your extension.

It's fairly popular (a bit over 58K active users) and someone already forked+modified the extension for another browser. It seems like if I charge some amount for the new features, it would be trivial for someone to fork it, remove the subscription check, and distribute it as a new extension. Similarly, they could add their own payment system and charge for the clone by changing just a few lines.

As it stands, giving it away for free means there's nothing at stake. Adding a payment check in plain JS feels like it would generally work but incentivizes other putting in the time to crack it or clone it for profit and there's no great way back from that point.

Well, your extension has 50k+ users. What percentage do you think would try to get around the payment system? I'm guessing most of your users aren't that technical, they just hate those recipe card things :) And how many users does the next most popular fork of your extension have?

Notion Boost is also an open-source extension on Github with 20k+ users and has made a bunch of money from users paying for pro features. So there's at least one data point in your favor.

I'd also like to point out that you're speculating! You don't know what will happen :) One reason I made ExtensionPay was so that developers (including me!) can just try monetizing their extensions with no costs and very little time commitment and see what happens empirically — get the data.

How were you thinking about monetizing your extension anyway? Subscriptions? One-time? Freemium?

The web is now completely unusable without uBlock Origin and I Don't Care About Cookies. I honestly don't know how people go about their day without these things, especially on mobile.

uBlock Origin, Firefox Multi-Account Containers, Temporary Containers, Containerise, and Tree Style Tabs for me. I also quite like Tab Session Manager, and get a decent amount of use out of QR Code Generator.

uBlock Origin is an ad blocker, and script blocker, with per-site rules. I use it in "Advanced User" mode.

Multi-Account Containers allows isolating sites to containers, all cookies, local storage, etc, are kept within that container only (but all addons work across all containers). So my HN container saves my HN login, my Stackexchange container saves my stackexchange login, etc.

Temporary containers makes sites that aren't assigned to a permanent container get assigned to a temporary container that gets deleted shortly after they're closed. So anything that doesn't have a permanent assignment gets something akin to a Private Browsing tab.

Containerize allows wildcard matching for domains to permanent containers. So sites with logins that have a bunch of subdomains & redirects can match all of them to the same container. EG *.jetbrains.com opens in a container for Jetbrains, so their redirect-to-login flow works.

Tree-style tabs provides better organization of things I'm working on than flat tabs without a hierarchy.

Tab Session Manager lets me save and load entire sessions of tabs at once, or just single windows from a session, and give those sessions names.

QR Code Generator is handy for exactly what the name says.

How is this container strategy different from just disabling third-party cookies?

Containers isolate more than just cookies, they isolate all local storage. So each container acts like 3rd-party cookies are enabled, they get saved, everything works even when silly website authors use 3rd-party services for authenticaton, etc. But it's all isolated, so the sites in one container don't see any of the storage in another.

I use on Firefox:

- Bitwarden - Toggle Reddit Sidebar - uBlock Origin - Gramarly - Reddit Enhancement Suite - Gesturefy

On Edge (along with compatible Firefox Add-ons) - CrxMouse - SwiftRead (for speed reading any site or text. if you pay for Pro you can also speed read PDFs) - Scribe (to create step by step tutorials automatically: https://scribehow.com/signup?affiliate=2fe22b23-335a-4f91-bd...)

Export Tabs URLs

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/export-tabs-u...

Used to dump tab URLs into a text file for later use. Has the option of selecting and editing the text of the file before saving, filtering the file contents, only selecting tabs from the current window in Firefox, and adding the title of each tab above its URL.

Tab Session Manager will export tabs and much more (but the export is json).

uBlacklist by iorate (Firefox / Chrome) - hides google / ddg search results from unwanted domains (medium and pinterest) and highlights others (wikipedia and github)

thank god, finally a way to block codegrepper from my searches. fuck that site

To be fair, when I needed to use Edge for work I only searched for three out of four extensions I have on personal Firefox:

1) - uBlock Origin

2) - Hover Zoom+

3) - Limit Tabs

Couldn't find the last one, or something similar at least. There is one extra addon which I don't need on my work computer, but use it on Firefox personal computer:

Update Scanner (you can scan webpages for changes, or use it like an RSS feed)

LE: i think i will increase the list after reading this thread, HTML5 playback speed does sound usefull.

* Stylus - super useful. I auto color my dev/qa/prod environments so I don't do anything stupid. I color code the stocks in my brokerage account by strategy. I fix some of the terrible pastel colors in Microsoft products.

* Tab ReTitle+ - useful when you have multiple tabs open with identical titles.

* Zoom Tab auto-close+ - Closes Zoom tabs once opened.

* ColorZilla - A quick color-picker. I do some light web-dev and it's marginally more convenient than inspecting.

* Firefox Color - Quick browser changes, also do some custom stuff in UserChrome.css

* History Cleaner - Deletes my history after x weeks.

* LastPass - Just what I thought was best in 2016, not sure what's best these days but I'm somewhat satisfied

I find Firefox's built-in tracker blockers adequate for my usage these days (used to use uBlock Origin). Also, Firefox containers is a game changer for isolating work/personal or dev/qa.

I would also recommend learning how to write/use Bookmarklets and edit UserChrome.css for greater productivity/customization.

[+]Some of the above are not large enough to be audited by Mozilla, but the source code is on Github.

> LastPass - Just what I thought was best in 2016, not sure what's best these days but I'm somewhat satisfied

1Password

uBlock - ad blocking

Bitwarden - password manager

Sidebery - a bit nicer Tree Style Tabs

Tridactyl - vim shortcuts

Tab Session Manager - manage multiple sessions of windows and tabs. Back in university I used it to have many "sessions" attached to assignments I'd been doing.

Currently I have "work", "leisure" and "hobby" sessions with a bunch of various project sessions hopefully I'm gonna pick up someday :)

I use Sidebery for something like 'session' management - except all in one window: panels mapped to containers, and container per 'work'/'hobby'/etc.

My list:

The essential one: Ublock Origin of course; surfing the web without it is next to impossible today.

-A bit less essential but very helpful:

HTTPS Everywhere: forces the browser to connect to secure pages anyway.

Privacy Badger: by the EFF. Blocks trackers.

uMatrix: NoScript on steroids. Allows to turn off parts of the web page with deep granularity (filter by domain and type of data). Needs "training", not for new users, don't install on granma's PC.

Duck Duck Go Privacy Essentials: Blocks trackers and other things.

-Then among the useful albeit not essential:

DownThemAll: to quickly download files (docs, images, pdfs etc) from sites.

FeedBro: Feed reader. Featureful RSS, Atom, RDF Reader.

Nitter Redirect: Redirects automatically Twitter links to Nitter, a Twitter front end that respects the users privacy.

Redirect AMP to HTML: Redirects Google AMP pages to their original ones.

Bypass Paywalls: to bypass many news sites paywalls.

StartPage.com: Redirects searches to StartPage.com, which essentially is to Google what DuckDuckGo is to Bing.

Livemarks: Restores RSS live bookmark support on Firefox after it was removed from Mozilla.

Search By Image: a reverse image search addon which supports various search engines.

Privacy Badger is unnecessary, it's a worse version of uBlock.

Also HTTPS Everywhere can be replaced with the Force HTTPS option natively implemented in Firefox.

Not only firefox, but edge, chrome and safari too. EFF is deprecating HTTPS everywhere. See https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/09/https-actually-everywh...

Thanks to both of you, too late to edit the post unfortunately.

I'm going to cry bitter tears when uMatrix eventually stops working on newer versions.

Not a browser extension but I use Adguard Home hosted on my server to have all ads resolve with non existent IP and it can work network wide, so I don't really need to install ad blockers on every device.

But the difference is, since it can't touch the page itself like extensions, you can't get rid of the ad space if it's pre occupied as empty space.

I'm surprised no one here has mentioned OneTab

https://www.one-tab.com/

With a click of a button, it throws all of your current tabs open into a single page (via hyperlinks), from which you have a lot of capability on what to do with them (open, open selected, bookmark, delete, etc)

Does it survive browser closing and reopening?

Yes.

Yes it does. You can even sync it across devices I think

All firefox:

---

Must have:

- uBlock Origin

---

Must have for me:

- I wrote a "mark seen" add-on for HN (and a few other sites). And I'm the only user :): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/seen-it-all/

- ScrollAnywhere (drag right click to scroll; if I wasn't using this I'd have rocker gestures instead, also nice but incompatible with my setup :) )

- SponsorBlock (in-video adblock working for bigger youtube channels)

- Dark Reader (best global dark mode)

- Some password manager

- Sidebery (tabs in sidebar. slickest app, but sometimes a bit bugged...)

---

Nice to haves:

- Tapermonkey for userscripts (js injection)

- Stylish for custom CSS

- Saka Key (non-intrusive keyboard shortcuts for everything in the browser)

- Textarea Cache (form did not submit or you accidentally closed the tab before sending? This is the rescue)

- Auto Tab Discard (If I opened way too many tabs)

- Translate Web Pages (most like the chrome version)

- Open in PDF Reader (I like sumatra over the js in browser one)

For saving web pages, parts of them or bookmarks as plain files, I can recommend the TagSpaces Web Clipper https://www.tagspaces.org/products/webclipper/

For iOS Safari (both iPad and iPhone) I recently found StopTheMadness which is amazing.

It’s. grabbag of great features and make iOS browsing more like a desktop. Let you get the context menu for any image, show native video controls, stop sites from blocking right click or paste, etc.

I recommend Falcon[0][1], I wish Firefox had an equivalent. It basically does full-text search of any website visited. I discovered it via HN[2].

[0]: https://github.com/lengstrom/falcon [1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/falcon/mmifbbohghe... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12479977

https://closetab.email - delivers a digest of your bookmarks to your inbox every monday. Helps me defer content from HN turning into a bunch of unclosed tabs in my browser.

OneTab. Good for saving tabs, but equally handy for opening a whole bunch of URLs at once.

Chrome extensions i use:

adblock plus, google dictionary (just highlight a word and it will define it, or if it isn't an english word it will translate it to english), poper blocker, grammarly, "I don't care about cookies".

> adblock plus

i would suggest replacing that one with ublock origin since ABP has a very shady business model that directly interferes with their adblocking

Calm Twitter: it hides the number of likes and the trending stuff.

This greatly reduces the urge to get into Twitter arguments, and the aggravation the site induces, making it a pleasant pastime rather than a hate-inducing machine.

To add to the list of great extensions mentioned here:

- News Feed Eradicator

Inspired from "Indistractible" by Nir Eyal, I found it very useful in removing unnecessary visual noise and distractions when I check my messages on Facebook.

- uBlock Origin for FF and Chrome. For Safari (on both macOS and iOS) I use wipr.

- Dark Reader

+ to Dark Reader. Can’t stand most websites without it. Not sure how we switched from a dark screen to wanting everybody to stare into a bright lightbulb all day, but I’m glad things are finally going back.

I was kind of forced into the Dark Reader way of life and I love it. I got a monitor with Adobe RGB color gamut. I have no use for this, and the OS doesn't understand it, so by default all colors are wrong. I know it's wrong and it makes me mad. So I put the monitor into sRGB mode. But in that mode, you can't adjust the brightness and so things are way too bright. I use dark mode for everything, though, so it's not too bad. The improved contrast ratio is actually excellent, and I much prefer a too-bright monitor in dark mode to a dim monitor in either bright or dark mode.

Dark Reader was the missing link for web designers that won't make a dark mode. Honestly, in a lot of cases it does a nicer job than the designer, so for a few sites I opt out of dark mode and let Dark Reader do it for me.

HN is one of the hardest sites to get right, however. It seems to change every version. My current configuration is: Dynamic, Contrast +20, Grayscale +100. I lose my topcolor, but everything else looks good. (This changed with a recent Dark Reader update. I had everything perfect, but the algorithm changed, and so I compromised on this. A few weeks in, and HN looks normal to me. If I saw the unmodified page, I don't think I'd know which site I was on!)

Good thing about Dark Reader is, that it is available for Firefox for Android.

Shutup removes comments from sites. It’s made the web much more pleasant.

sadly this doesnt seem to work on sites outside the US(?). I've tried it on spiegel.de and still see comments.

Okay one I haven't seen mentioned that I have been using a lot: Chrome Currency Converter, you can have it configured that when you press a shortcut all currencies on a page are converted to your local one. For me, when I press Alt-c the whole page changes from $ to my currency

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-currency-co...

I wish something like this existed but with time zones.

For example, any time a website mentions "Tuesday 10AM PST", I want to be able to hover over it to reveal the time/date in my own timezone.

Have looked but couldn't really find anything.

That's a great idea! I never knew i wanted this until now!

Edit: Just found this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/time-zone-converte... seems to work great not hover but right click and select

Thanks for the link!

Simple Tab Groups - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...

It is what Firefox Tab Group / Panorama should always had been. It makes tab groups backup periodically so you will not loose them. I used this once to move tabs to a different computer, but it's good to know it's there. It also integrates with Tab Containers if you want it.

I am looking and I don't see my preferred extensions without which I cannot live (I won't repeat the already mentioned ones):

- Selection Context Search - very extensible addon which will allows you to select in page and use that for opening an URL: search in any engine, add to search strings in Wikipedia, IMDB, torrents, almost anything

- Ant Video Downloader - downloads any video from page

- Bookmark Tab Here - bookmark by right clicking directly on bookmark folder

- HistoryBlock - blocklists sites from history (for example google.com, your search history)

Some less obvious ones for Chromium based browsers I use:

- Privacy Redirect [redirects you on the fly to custom frontedns for popular services like YT, Reddit, Wiki, etc.]

- Buster: Captcha Solver For Humans [solves captchas for me]

- WebRTC Control [I don't like an idea of leaking IP over WebRTC when I don't use it]

- Change Geolocation [forces a certain coordinates as a response to websites asking about your location]

- Disable HTML5 Autoplay [kind of obvious]

- PocketTube: Youtube Subscription Manager [I can't find anything on YT in the channels I subscribe to without it!]

Dark Reader, 1Password, uBlock Origin, Stylus, SpeedUp, CSS Scan, Privacy Redirect, DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials. These are must-use for me, both in terms of personal life and work.

https://unhook.app/ - Remove recommandations from YouTube (so you can still used and watch it without getting into rabbit holes or end up procrastinating)

Colour Contrast Checker - Good when developing, always being able to check contrast between text/background to keep it accessible

LeechBlock - Limit the time on specific websites

BitWarden - Password manager

TextBlaze - Canned messages, good if you often respond to emails with the same message.

My list: - uBlock Origin - Bitwarden - Never-Consent - Decentraleyes - Privacy Badger - HTTPS Everywhere - clearURLs - Enhancer for YouTube - Twitter to Nitter

Toby - Bookmark and organize browser tabs

Pocket/Instapaper - To save articles for offline use

Video Speed Controller - Play videos at faster playback speed, time is precious

Send to Kindle - To send articles to Kindle

For Chrome:

* Authy (2FA)

* Rofocus [1] - productivity extension that's free and gets me into flow (ambient music + pomodoro timers)

* Loom - moved almost 100% to asynchronous 'meetings' and I regularly record tutorials for documentation purposes

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rofocus-increase-y...

https://github.com/televator-apps/vimari, https://giorgiocalderolla.com/wipr.html and https://github.com/shumbo/Svadilfari (on iOS)

At the moment, just ublock origin. I think of writing a few special ones of my own, or mayb extending ublock origin. I haven't felt a need for any of the others mentioned here so far. This is in Firefox. I really just hate the web though. I have a few frequently used sites that ublock can't clean up enough, so I read those through special proxies that strip out pretty much everything.

Don't see this mentioned here but recently I've been using this a lot: Kill-Sticky - Remove all elements with fixed or sticky positions https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kill-sticky/lekjlg...

For me my most essential ones (Firefox) are: uBlock Origin (advanced mode, RIP uMatrix), Right Click Search (lets you right click search using all available search engines), ClearURLs (mostly to make it a bit easier to copy the useful part of URLs, might help avoid some tracking), and SingleFile (downloads a page into one file using data URLs for images).

> Right Click Search (lets you right click search using all available search engines)

You can do this in Firefox without an extension.

How? It is certainly not possible by default. You can set the right click search to be any particular one in the preferences but you can't, as far as I know, get a list so that you can search any particular text from any available search engine, which is what Right Click Search does. I did a quick search for "search" in about:config and didn't see anything that looked related.

Firefox extensions:

- uBlock Origin

- Firefox Multi-Account Containers

- Tree Style Tab

- Context Search Origin - Allows searching from bookmarked search providers, killer feature is "Search All in Tabs" option which opens a tab for every provider in bookmark folder

- FoxyProxy - I've defined rules for blocked sites to open in Tor, much more usable than using Onion Browser, though less privacy

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/text-to-speech/bkj... has a nice text to speech software, something like what the edge browser has

Vimium if you're a "vi" user. :) Keyboard-driven control of the Web browser.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogba...

There is one extension that doesn't exist yet but I want: The right solution to using the modern web is an allow-list based approach. Let the user be in control of the details of every request and response and action taken by the browser. Then people who want to can choose their own way to interact with the web.

Sounds like uMatrix

uMatrix can be configured similarly, but it is extremely limited. I am thinking something more like the Firefox/Chrome DevTools.

Also uMatrix is no longer maintained.

Opt-out - Send GDPR / CCPA data deletion or access requests to the website you visit.

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/opt-out-send-gdpr-...

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/android/addon/opt-out/

Disclosure: I'm one of the creators.

Dynamo for Safari - slows down videos and lets you skip adds. https://dynamoformac.com Also: Dark Reader https://darkreader.org/safari/

  Enhanced Firefox UX:
  - Vimium
  - Tree Style Tab
  - Dark Reader
  - Last Pass
  - Bypass Pywalls
  - Sponsor Block

  Privacy:
  - Ublock Origin
  - Privacy Badger

  Dev:
  - Wappalyzer
  - What Font
  - WAVE

  Web3:
  - Metamask
  - Phantom
  (adding more)

  Other:
  - Scrobbler for last.fm

Every time I setup a new computer/OS I always put Ublock and adblock plus (yes I use both)

Also have my own extensions, in particular one that dumps all the active tab titles with urls for future lookup and a YT one that hides the homepage crap so I don't get distracted whenever I go on there to do something.

Using another ad blocker along uBO leads to worse results than using uBO alone, I keep warning people about this, see <https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/1033706103782170625>.

My experience has been fine, is possible memory performance the main concern? I have been pretty happy with the ad blocking performance itself, seems to be working right.

edit: I did check out your GitHub I see now why what you're saying has weight, okay I will go with just UBO.

Vimium! (x1000)

Winger has been a great productivity booster. No relationship. Just a happy user. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/winger/

Vimium, uBlock Origin, Twitter to Nitter

https://www.no-thanks-extension.com

Paid extension, and I'd happily pay 10x the price. It is an incredible timesaver and the developer is super responsive when you report sites.

FakeSpot - filters out amazon / ebay search results that have high rates of fake reviews

Bitwarden - for passwords

Brave - for adblock built in

Sponsorblock - to cull all the youtube bullshit

Imagus - to hover over images and see the content without having to open a new tab

old reddit redirect - for the occasional google result that takes you to reddit

reddit enhancement suite - to remove all custom css from old reddit

I like markdown here. Allows you to format you emails ( and other stuff ?? ) with markdown

Imagus is a must for me https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/imagus/

My Firefox extensions:

- Vimium

- uBlock Origin

- Clickbait Remover for Youtube

- Enhancer for Youtube

- Exif Viewer

- ClearURLs (have to disable it, though, most of the time as it breaks sites)

I love Momentum Dash - https://momentumdash.com

And Control Space - https://controlspace.app

Wanted to post a complete list. But have also considered that your browser extensions really do help in making your digital fingerprint unique. This thread is a doxxers (not quite gold but perhaps bronze) mine, perhaps.

> This thread is a doxxers (not quite gold but perhaps bronze) mine, perhaps.

Please elaborate.

If you are on gmail and want to learn more shortcuts try: https://github.com/janmechtel/shortcutsensei

I use and recommend Session Buddy. I don't agree with all the ad blockers extensions because of course ads are annoying, but a big part of the content in the internet would not be available without them

Edgar Dijkstra's 1988 Paper "On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science"

It's just a paper, but still I'd recommend it, because it was highly influential. It was indeed so influential that it has its own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Cruelty_of_Really_Teach...

In the paper he argues that

- the computer industy has been progressing with exponential growth 1948-1988,

- will continue to do so for decades (he was right in that)

- this rate of progress is unprecedented, and the human brain is unfit to deal with such growth, thus

- the only way to deal with such enormous mount of power is: Mathematics, because proofs are rigorous. (I'm simplifying a bit here.)

Okay, but how do I get Edsger(!) Dijkstra as a Firefox add-on? ;-)

wrong thread?

I use Safari with Adguard and 1Password.

After using Bitwarden for about 2 years, I recently switched to 1Password and it blows Bitwarden out of the water. Far more efficient and easier to use. A bit more expensive though.

I use a fairly standard suite of addons for Firefox, mainly for privacy and tab management:

NoScript, uBlock Origin, Multi-Account Containers, Skip Redirect, Neat URL, Tabhunter, MoveTab, Foxy Gestures, Stylus

I'm surprised none of the top comments mention adblock; most of the article websites I visit (accessed through HN) would not be navigable without an ad blocker.

Because the top text already mentioned uBlock Origin.

I use a browser/OS combo that makes it very difficult to use any add-ons except for a DNS-based adblocker, and the only thing I miss is a password-filler-inner.

(Firefox)

- Sidebery: Vertical tabs, personally feels it's better then TreeStyleTabs

- Enhancer For Youtube

- Custom Scrollbars

- Decentraleyes: Use local javascript libs over remote ones

- Dark Reader: Dark mode for pages without dark mode

- To DeepL

Everyone seems to mention privacy extensions. I'd also add some tab suspender extension to the list to save ram/cpu, especially on battery.

We would humbly suggest you to try https://www.honest.is/

Unpinterested makes google image search a lot more usable, to the point that I get frustrated whenever I use image search on my phone now.

In addition to previously mentioned, I also download tampermonkey. I can make use of several websites by fiddling with js code.

AutoTabDiscard, to save memory on many open tabs.

(Firefox addon)

It's good, but unfortunately it can only prevent a URL being suspended for the current session, not whitelist it forever like The Marvellous Suspender (Chrome). This is really annoying when working through an infinite-scroll page like a YouTube channel, which loses its place when it gets suspended.

In case you didn't know, and for anyone else, Auto Tab Discard has a permanent whitelist. There's a menu option to add a domain to the whitelist, and you can also add regular expressions. It's also on the preferences page of course.

> add a domain to the whitelist

That's the problem though. I want to whitelist single URLs for particular YouTube channel video lists, not the whole of YouTube.

I understand. I also mentioned regular expressions. It's not as convenient as a menu option, but it's not too difficult and it works. For instance, you can add this rule to the whitelist to not discard any YouTube channel video lists: re:https://www.youtube.com/.*/videos

You said particular YouTube channels, so in that case you can just put the full URL for those channels, e.g. re:https://www.youtube.com/channel/SomeChannelABC123/videos

* SponsorBlock for YouTube - Skip Sponsorships

I use cultivate to know country of origin on products I buy, though I am open to better alternatives, if someone knows one

Is there a solution of other countries? Cultivate seems to focus on "Made in the US", which is great if you're in the US, but if you're in Europe you might prefer stuff made closer to you.

exactly (though it does provide general COA) it would be nice for it to be more agnostic

I don't Care About Cookies and Privacy Redirect, ideally with a self hosted Invidious instance (and Nitter etc.).

My repertoire in Firefox: uBlock Origin, Multi-Account Containers, Temporary Containers, SponsorBlock, Decentraleyes.

I’m going vanilla. My only default extension is a json viewer. Everything else I toggle on/off when needed.

not mentioned yet: Switch to audible tab - button that jumps through all the tabs that are currently playing audio (optionally also through tabs you have muted). Very helpful for either a) finding the tab with the conf call again or b) quickly finding whatever suddenly makes noise

One less popular extension to add to others list: ublacklist

Helps you exclude any site from your search engine easily.

Just Brave browser. It has built-in ad-blocking and good defaults. It even has ad-hoc TOR if needed.

Vimium, uBlock Origin, Violent Monkey

I think uBlock Origin is definitely a must-have as a browser extension.

Anyone else not use browser extensions for various reasons?

I do use a browser extensions, but nearly to the extend others apparently do.

For both Firefox and Safari I use exactly two extensions: Duck Duck Go Privacy Essentials and Lastpass. I don't really see the point in maintaining a long list of extensions or try to customize the browser. Long term I believe it's easier to just learn to use and accept the browser as is.

- uBlock Origin - tabmanager.io - React Developer Tools

Here is my list:

- uBlock Origin (blocks ads)

- Privacy Badger (blocks trackers and what not)

- I don't care about cookies (I'm in Europe where it's cookie banner hell)

- 1pass or lastpass (password manger)

- SponsorBlock for YouTube (skip YouTube promotion sections)

- Bypass Paywalls Clean (skip the payways on many different sites)

Europe has caused cookie banner hell globally. It's not just in Europe.

brave browser, brave search

- vimium for keyboard browser control

- darkreader makes all sites dark

- ublock origin

- tab redirect, force new tabs to hit a page i specified

- password manager

- instapaper, clips webpages/links for later

Just curious - have you tried Surfingkeys (an alternative to vimium)?

I've not. I'll give it a look thanks

- Javascript switcher

- YouTube in-video ad remover

I have only the above two active.

Why not just pay a few bucks for YouTube premium to get rid of the ad? I’m not judging, just genuinely curious. I’m hesitant to invest in YouTube ads for my project, because I assume that majority of high worth customers pay for the premium and would not see my ads.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypass-paywal...

I recommend Vimium C and Ublock Origin.

And Ncage lol

I also use Pricacy Badger from the EFF.

uBlock Origin, Stylus, and Dark Reader.

Hush for Safari (block cookie notices)

Let me quote one of the comments in App Store:

"It’s not clear what this does “ Now browsing without the…”. Without what? The app gives me one sentence of explanation, but it doesn’t fit on the screen. Why would I need to know what it does? I mean, does it say “ok” and accept the cookies on every page? How would I know?"

It's finally explained in FAQ on GitHub: https://github.com/oblador/hush#faq

Bypass paywalls clean

Ublock origin

Decentraleyes

Bitwarden

Also, turn on the privacy.resistFingerprinting flag in Firefox about:config.

resistFingerprinting has kind of a nasty side effect of making every website think you are in UTC. I put up with it, but I’m sure others may find it annoying.

Ah, this explains why Uber Eats gives me ETA in UTC...

Bypass paywalls clean seems really nice. Thanks!

Firefox Multi-Account Containers

uBlock Origin and NoScript are my essentials, those two can take care of most things.

Ublock origin, Mercury Reader

OneTab UBlock Origin No Coin

I use Chrome

Cookie AutoDelete

uBlock

Dark Mode

LastPass

SiteBlocker (Blocks certain URLs / sites from being visited.I use it to block URLs (articles ,etc) I found useless so that I don't have to read them again)

Channel Blocker ( removes videos of certain channels from YouTube - I use it to block certain channels that are clickbait but top the YouTube results)

Bypass Paywall

Nimbus Screenshot

Clear NewTab

- adnauseam

- Facebook Container

hacker news enhancement suite

None, I don't use any extensions.

Vimium C

Stylus!

I have a shitload of free and useful extensions I use often (Chrome):

ORGANIZATION:

- SimpleExtManager "A simple menu to enable, disable and access options of extensions". This allows me to have a zillion extensions and not be all active all the time.

- OneTab "Save up to 95% memory and reduce tab clutter". I use that to not have 30 tabs open when I'm researching a given subject. They're all saved as neatly organised links. It's super useful to quickly share a group of tabs (links) to a friend.

- Raindrop.io "All-in-one bookmark manager". Prettiest and most useful bookmark manager, automatically takes thumbnails, tags and meta info from a website. They also have desktop and mobile apps so all my bookmarks are super available. It's my default window when I open a new tab.

- Save to Notion "Save links to your Notion databases". For saving website pages as part of a given workflow because Notion is where I manage my work (freelance & indie projects). You can save pages in templated formats, it's really neat.

Basically I use OneTab for saving, reopening and sharing groups of tabs of a given work session, I use Raindrop for saving bookmarks of my favourite websites (dev & design tools for example), and I use Save to Notion to save pages as part of a project workflow (landing page of a potential partner for a project or linkedin profile of a potential client).

- 1Password That's just my password manager. I think it works great, on all devices.

----

CONVENIENCE:

- Google Translate "View translations easily as you browse the web. By the Google Translate team." I translate stuff often, English isn't my native language.

- I don't care about cookies Auto-removes cookie banners and auto-accepts them if it's the only way to remove the banners.

- uBlock Origin "Finally, an efficient blocker. Easy on CPU and memory". I think everybody already has that haha.

- Dark Reader "Dark mode for every website. Take care of your eyes, use dark theme for night and daily browsing." So my girlfriend doesn't kill me when I open super bright tabs at 2am in bed.

---

DECONSTRUCTING PRODUCTS (to learn how to build them)

- Wayback Machine "Reduce annoying 404 pages by automatically checking for an archived copy in the Wayback Machine." I love seeing how some websites evolved over time to learn about their owners' decisions.

- CSS Peeper "Extract CSS and build beautiful styleguides." Getting color HEX codes from existing websites or deconstructing how they set up their paddings, margins etc is always neat.

- Wappalyzer "Identify web technologies". I like to use it to see if something is built in no-code with a webflow CMS for example. But you really see everything someone's used to build a website. I've tried multiple tools like this one and I think this is the simplest one to understand. Builtwith has too much info to my taste.

Then there's a few other extensions that I'm trying now but I'm not sure I'll keep so I won't recommend them yet. Mostly work-related for specific tools I use.

All the usual suspects named previously: uBlock Origin, Bitwarden, ViolentMonkey, Vimium, etc. Plus:

* Buster Captcha Solver --Poetic justice in browser extension form! Uses Google's speech recognition software against Google's ReCaptcha to solve the captchas, This browser extension more than any other has probably saved me from going on a killing rampage against whoever invented ReCaptcha

https://github.com/dessant/buster

* Typio Form Recovery --Fantastic extension that allows you to recover the data you've just typed into a browser web form and which has been lost through browser crashing / page reloading / etc. Has saved me tearing what's left of my hair out on many occasions:

https://typiorecovery.github.io/

* Shift Click --As the name suggests. Shift+Click on any image on a webpage and it will open the image in a new tab. Great for quickly getting the full-size version of images on web pages and more useful than it sounds, as it saves opening the browsers dev tools pane and source code diving. I use it all the time on eBay to inspect full size images of items I'm looking at and which eBay will only display at a certain size:

https://shft.cl

* Country Flag & Whois --not exactly a necessity, but a fun extension anyway. Gives you a wee flag at the side of your address bar, showing you which country the server of the site you're visiting is hosted in. On a more practical note, you can click the flag to view the Whois info for that domain:

https://add0n.com/country-flags.html

* Asccidoctor.js Live Preview --A while back I started using AsciiDoc for all my text composing needs, after finding the limitations and ever-multiplying variants of MarkDown increasingly annoying. Unfortunately, while many text editors come with Markdown preview capabilities, I've yet to find one that can do AsciiDoc previews. So that's where this extension comes in. I open my AscciDoc files in my browser and this extension automatically generates a preview, which I can then 'print to PDF' to have a nicely formatted document created using AsciiDoc:

https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor-browser-extension

* Stylebot --Inject custom CSS into any webpage. I use it on a couple of sites to fix annoying browser rendering quirks or remove irritating content [with display:none;].

https://stylebot.dev

* FireNvim --a nice accompaniment to Vimium. This extension turns text entry windows in web forms into NeoVim edit bufffers, allowing you to edit text using an embedded NeoVim instance. I don't actually use this as much as I thought I might, as I nearly always forget I have it installed:

https://github.com/glacambre/firenvim

These last two aren't browser extensions as such. But I can't imagine using my browser without these. So I think they deserve an honourable mention:

* Pinboard bookmarklet --I use Pinboard to save all my bookmarks. So they're accessible across all my browsers and all my devices. I have the Pinboard bookmarklet on the browser address bar on my desktop machines [and use the 'Share' menu on Android] to quickly bookmark pages from wherever I'm browsing.

* Telegram --One step down from permanent bookmarking via Pinboard, I use Telegram as my messenger app and avail of this facility all the time on Android to quickly stash links I want to take a look at later on a 'proper' computer --either to view on a larger screen, or because [as with this post] I want to compose a reply, without wrestling with a crappy touchscreen keyboard. Telegram has a 'Saved Messages' chat. So, on an Android device, I hit the 'Share' icon beside the URL on a page I want to save for later and then in the Share window that pops up, I send the URL to Telegram 'Saved Messages' where I can grab it later, when I'm on a real computer.

For anyone using Yandex Mail; Yandex also have a Telegram Bot which provides a similar function but also emails you the link as well. I used to use this til I realised the emails where pretty superfluous and just started sending links to my Telegram 'Saved Messages' instead:

https://t.me/YandexMail360_bot

EDIT: A couple more I found in my browser's preferences but which I forgot about because you don't directly interact with them:

* Redirect AMP to HTML --as the name suggests, tells servers you want to be served up the HTML version of a page rather than the AMP version because... fuck Google, basically.

https://www.daniel.priv.no/web-extensions/amp2html.html

* Nimbus Screenshot --Comes in handy sometimes when you want to grab a screenshot of part of a webpage which is too big to fit in the browser window without scrolling. Nimbus Screenshot has various capturing modes including 'Select and Scroll' which allows you to do this.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nimbus-screenshot-...

* Chrome Extension Source Viewer --Allows you to download Chrome extensions as CRX files from the Chrome Webstore. Thus allowing you to manually install them on browsers which refuse to install them directly. I've used this to successfully install a couple of Chrome extensions on Yandex Browser in Android, which the browser refused to install, telling me they were incompatible.

https://github.com/Rob--W/crxviewer

NoScript

Vimium.

- uBlock Origin

- Bitwarden

- Imagus

- Session Buddy

- Save Page WE

- Unpaywall

- Bypass paywall clean

- CrxMouse Gestures

- Ghostery

- Firefox Containers

These are across browsers (Firfox/Chrome and Opera)

Occasionally use Brave for some casual browsing.

Here are a few Chrome extensions you can check out:

* Improve YouTube! - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/improve-youtube-vi...

* Reader Mode - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reader-mode/llimhh...

* Google Images Restored - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-images-rest...

* Intention - Stop Mindless Browsing - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/intention-stop-min...

* Video Speed Controller - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-contro...

* New Tab Changer - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/new-tab-changer/oc...

* JSON Lite - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/json-lite/acacmjci...

* streamkeys - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/streamkeys/ekpipjo...

* AutoFormer+ - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autoformer%20/cjef...

* Pushbullet - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pushbullet/chlffgp...

* AutoScroll - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autoscroll/occjjkg...

* No Mouse Wheel Zoom - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/no-mouse-wheel-zoo...

I will write about Firefox extensions. Firefox is the only browser with some privacy potential. Chrome and Brave are spyware.

* privacy / ads block:

- uBlock Origin

- Decentraleyes (against "free", centralized, content delivery): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/decentraleyes...

- Disable-javascript (a simple javascript switch) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-javas...

- Twitter (and Facebook) containers https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/twitter-conta...

* bookmarking / organization:

- Tab Session Manager https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-m... (to save sessions)

- Stringmark https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stringmark-hi... (simple bookmark manager, locally stored, that also save snipped of texts and with possibilities of creating separate lists, perfect for academic research)

* to improve navigation

- SponsorBlock https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/ (it help skipping annoying youtube content within popular videos)

> ...Chrome and Brave are spyware.

I understand Chrome, but Brave ? Care to expatiate ?

https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/brave.html

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