Refresh my Firefox extensions so they'll play nicely
November 21, 2019 6:17 AM Subscribe
Firefox has been slooooow, and is suggesting that I hit the refresh button. I have never done this, and am a little unnerved about losing my extensions. At the same time it may be the extensions slowing me down, so...Please tell me which add-ons/extensions will help with privacy, security, and ad blocking, and which will not conflict with each other.
I did see this question from January of this year.
The slowdown has puzzled me because browsing the web is most of what I do on this computer. Figured I'd start with the Firefox refresh and see what happens. This is a black box to me. If you have additional advice about diagnosing slowdowns, please feel free to include it. The "best of" extension lists are fine; I'd like to hear what MeFites find useful.
I did see this question from January of this year.
The slowdown has puzzled me because browsing the web is most of what I do on this computer. Figured I'd start with the Firefox refresh and see what happens. This is a black box to me. If you have additional advice about diagnosing slowdowns, please feel free to include it. The "best of" extension lists are fine; I'd like to hear what MeFites find useful.
I believe you're asking about the Firefox Refresh Feature? It's not a bad idea to start fresh. But a couple of things to try first...
You might get some insight into why Firefox is slow by looking at the Task Manager. Sort by "Energy Impact". They should all be 0 or Low, maybe Medium for an active tab.
To get a quick preview of whether a refresh might fix things, try launching a private window in Firefox. That loads with no profile at all, including no extensions. Is it faster? Note it's inconvenient to do this because private windows don't have all your cookies, so you have to log in again. A Refresh keeps your cookies and a few other things, but resets a lot.
To directly answer your question; the only privacy / ad-blocker addon I definitely recommend is uBlock Origin. That'll block ads and a lot of tracker. Firefox itself blocks a lot of trackers now too, and while something like Privacy Badger can do even more it's not clear it's worth the extra hassle and overhead. Anyway start with just uBlock Origin and see if it runs faster, you can always add more extensions later.
The one other extension you might need / want is the one for your password manager like LastPass or 1Password.
posted by Nelson at 8:02 AM on November 21, 2019 [2 favorites]
You might get some insight into why Firefox is slow by looking at the Task Manager. Sort by "Energy Impact". They should all be 0 or Low, maybe Medium for an active tab.
To get a quick preview of whether a refresh might fix things, try launching a private window in Firefox. That loads with no profile at all, including no extensions. Is it faster? Note it's inconvenient to do this because private windows don't have all your cookies, so you have to log in again. A Refresh keeps your cookies and a few other things, but resets a lot.
To directly answer your question; the only privacy / ad-blocker addon I definitely recommend is uBlock Origin. That'll block ads and a lot of tracker. Firefox itself blocks a lot of trackers now too, and while something like Privacy Badger can do even more it's not clear it's worth the extra hassle and overhead. Anyway start with just uBlock Origin and see if it runs faster, you can always add more extensions later.
The one other extension you might need / want is the one for your password manager like LastPass or 1Password.
posted by Nelson at 8:02 AM on November 21, 2019 [2 favorites]
Best answer: help with privacy, security, and ad blocking, and which will not conflict with each other.
This is hard because Firefox has an ugly bug where extensions that modify the same CSP headers may conflict with each other. Notably, if uBO is configured to block remote fonts (it's not by default), uMatrix will stop blocking scripts.
It is possible and relatively easy to check if an extension modifies CSP headers before installing from Mozilla's extension repository. If it doesn't, then there will be no CSP conflicts; if it does, there may or may not be.
My advice: use uBO and Decentraleyes only, get rid of everything else.
If you insist on more then consider Temporary Containers paired with Containerise. These are not install and forget like uBlock, though, a bit of initial configuration is necessary.
posted by Bangaioh at 8:05 AM on November 21, 2019 [1 favorite]
This is hard because Firefox has an ugly bug where extensions that modify the same CSP headers may conflict with each other. Notably, if uBO is configured to block remote fonts (it's not by default), uMatrix will stop blocking scripts.
It is possible and relatively easy to check if an extension modifies CSP headers before installing from Mozilla's extension repository. If it doesn't, then there will be no CSP conflicts; if it does, there may or may not be.
My advice: use uBO and Decentraleyes only, get rid of everything else.
If you insist on more then consider Temporary Containers paired with Containerise. These are not install and forget like uBlock, though, a bit of initial configuration is necessary.
posted by Bangaioh at 8:05 AM on November 21, 2019 [1 favorite]
One thing you might try before doing a Refresh is clearing your offline website data/local storage, especially if your computer has a traditional hard drive rather than a solid-state drive. This is usually safe to do and less of a hassle than a full refresh, as very few websites use local storage for anything important. It's typically stuff like local copies of post drafts and tracking identifiers. You're likely to lose some extension settings, and some web games use local storage for saves, but aside from that it should be safe to clear.
To do so, open the Firefox options screen, search for "clear history," and click the Clear History button. In the window that appears, choose "Everything" as the time range to clear, then uncheck all the checkboxes aside from "Offline Website Data" and click Clear Now.
Clearing just local storage has sped up Firefox for me and a couple people I know. I tried it after using Process Monitor to examine a sluggish Firefox and noticing that it was spending a lot of time at startup reading everything in the local storage directory.
posted by skymt at 9:08 AM on November 21, 2019
To do so, open the Firefox options screen, search for "clear history," and click the Clear History button. In the window that appears, choose "Everything" as the time range to clear, then uncheck all the checkboxes aside from "Offline Website Data" and click Clear Now.
Clearing just local storage has sped up Firefox for me and a couple people I know. I tried it after using Process Monitor to examine a sluggish Firefox and noticing that it was spending a lot of time at startup reading everything in the local storage directory.
posted by skymt at 9:08 AM on November 21, 2019
Note that a Refresh will also reset any about:config settings that you've added/modified. That may or may not be what you want, depending on what (if anything) you've changed; but it's also possible that custom config settings could be contributing to the slow performance you're seeing.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:54 AM on November 21, 2019
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:54 AM on November 21, 2019
I'd also check that you're using Firefox Quantum, which is FF ≥ 57 (current version is 70). Pre-Quantum Firefox is painfully slow, and nearly all of the useful plugins have been re-written to work with Quantum.
posted by scruss at 12:35 PM on November 21, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by scruss at 12:35 PM on November 21, 2019 [1 favorite]
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FF is not my primary browser; that's Waterfox. But I do use it now and then and want it to be secure.
posted by Too-Ticky at 7:18 AM on November 21, 2019 [1 favorite]