Best FF Add Ons

December 12, 2023 3:09 PM

So I've made the switch to FF and I'm looking for your must have add ons. I have the usual suspects like Ublock, Bypass Paywalls, I Still Don't Care About Cookies and Copy Me That.

This has been asked, but 10+ years ago.

I just installed Tab Mix - Links because $(*&@#$(O* FF makes you jump through hoops to open links in a new tab and I couldn't get it to work. I know about middle click, but my muscle memory is trained and not easily changed

posted by kathrynm to Computers & Internet (15 answers total)

Multi-Account Containers
posted by sockpup at 3:25 PM on December 12, 2023 [5 favorites]

In order of how useful I find them:

Nuke Anything Enhanced. I mostly use it to clear away notices that I should create an account to read more. Sometimes it can blast away some kind of ad or auto-play video that gets around uBlock.
Image Picka. great for downloading multiple images from a web page in bulk. Also useful when a web site intentionally or unintentionally makes it hard to download an image. This will be able to grab them more than 95% of the time.
Image Search Options. Adds a context menu item so that you can just right-click on an image to open a Google reverse image search. You can configure it to use international search engines for things that Google misses. You can also configure it to use Bing or TinEye if for some reason you don't think those are a total joke.
Page Saver WE screenshot capture tool. Can capture an entire web page as an image, including the parts that are scrolled out of view. Sometimes useful when Image Picka is unable to find an image for you.
Tranquility Reader. Renders away the bling from a web page so that you can more easily copy + paste just the text.
Empty Cache Button. I think I used to use this regularly back when there was a cache viewer plugin that could be used to facilitate the download of images. I could clear the cache and then see just the images from the current page. Last I heard, cache viewer plugins are hard to make with current Firefox, and so this button just hangs around to help me feel cool. It can still be useful to free up space on your hard drive.
posted by polecat at 3:54 PM on December 12, 2023

Welcome!! I also recommend:

ClearURLS - removes a lot of the random tracking garbage that gets appended to URLs.
Download Manager (S3) - makes a little customizable download progress bar at the bottom of the tab instead of in the separate download manager. AKA Download Statusbar.
New Tab Override - lets you specify a URL to go to every time you open a tab. I have it set to a personal portal page.
Redirect AMP to HTML - Forgot I had this one, but it automatically switches from AMP articles.
Unpaywall - if you have to access academic papers at all, this centrally tracks whether they are available somewhere for free (legally, like on Arxiv) and provides a link.
Enhancer for YouTube - I think this has broken somewhat but it's nice to have a thing that automatically resizes and selects resolution while turning off annotations, etc. There are a few available.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 3:59 PM on December 12, 2023

Undo Close Tab - Undo Close Tab allows you to restore the most recently closed tab with a single button click and gives you access to the list of recently closed tabs in a context menu.
posted by gudrun at 4:34 PM on December 12, 2023

Seconding Multi-Account Containers, and if you use Facebook there's a specific Facebook Container that also has generic containers for other things. It will automatically detect if you click on a Meta site and put them in their own little sandbox. It also detects and blocks FB trackers on other websites.

Also, Privacy Badger.
"Privacy Badger is a browser extension that stops advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking where you go and what pages you look at on the web. If an advertiser seems to be tracking you across multiple websites without your permission, Privacy Badger automatically blocks that advertiser from loading any more content in your browser. To the advertiser, it’s like you suddenly disappeared."
posted by indexy at 4:55 PM on December 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

Show Metafilter deleted posts
Show Metafilter visual favorites sidebar
posted by Melismata at 5:17 PM on December 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

Selection Context Search is my favorite firefox extension. You know how you can highlight something in a browser and right click to search on your chosen search engine for it? Imagine if you could set up a list of places to search, all in the same menu. SCS lets you set up single click custom searches on any website that has a search box. I have it set up with wikipedia, goodreads, paperback swap, imdb, tumblr, and tons and tons of others, 36 in total! It takes a bit of setup and you must check the box for each one to show in the popup, but it makes my browsing so much faster.
posted by soelo at 5:31 PM on December 12, 2023

SponsorBlock for Youtube.
posted by oceano at 5:48 PM on December 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

OK, Group Speed Dial is (IMHO) great. Imagine if one tab was like the Telephone White Pages used to be, only you could have many tabs within that one tab, and every tab could have multiple rectangles with titles you pick and that refreshed with a mini version of the page. And you can export the whole thing (I do it every month on the 10th) including the page images to save you the trouble of refreshing them. Also if you know you have a saved link just do Ctrl-Shift-F and give a word that you know is in there and it will find all the references. And if you try to add another that you already have it will tell you what sub-tab it's in. You can also move between sub-tabs with right click drop down menus. I like my other add-ons but this I use every day if not every hour.

Also look into Foxy Tab (copy URLs to left, right or all is very helpful). Also Tree Style Tab (I put all my tabs vertically on the right... only problem is Firefox insists on keeping them going across the top also, probably a security thing or someting). Also Video Download Helper. You can consider One Tab which basically turns tabs into a document, or back into tabs (they claim it saves memory). Also Joplin Web Clipper if by some chance you are like me and use Joplin as your personal knowledge base.

I will now go look at all the other interesting suggestions above.

Sorry for not providing links to all of these, the Add Ons search in Firefox should find them for you easily enough.
posted by forthright at 6:04 PM on December 12, 2023

Tree Style Tab is essential.

In addition to Multi-Account Containers, Temporary Containers is great. I use it in full auto mode -- basically it's like every new tab you open is a clean, temporary browser. (I do recommend setting the Advanced -> Automatic Mode -> option to "Don't instantly reopen new tabs in temporary containers" because otherwise, when you hit Ctrl-T and start typing you lose the first few characters, which I find pretty annoying.)

SingleFile is a really well-done way to save/archive webpages.

Don't Fuck with Paste stops websites from blocking your ability to paste into form fields (like passwords). Also it has the best name.

Chameleon spoofs your browser and OS, which is fun and theoretically helpful for privacy, but it also tends to break things.

You can also use Ctrl-Shift-T to restore closed tabs.
posted by ropeladder at 6:09 PM on December 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

I like the Dark Reader extension which basically adds a dark mode to pretty much any website regardless of whether it supports one natively. I have it set to only darken websites I choose, but you can do the opposite, or follow the system dark mode, or switch based on time of day, etc.
posted by Aleyn at 6:51 PM on December 12, 2023

Seconding Tree Style Tab. I don't know how anyone who opens as many tabs as I do can live without vertical tabs (my preference is to have them on the right; this may be because I'm right-handed; YMMV). I believe that TST is currently the best and most stable vertical tabs extension, and it's very configurable.

I also use TST Colored Tabs to colour tabs based on the domain. This is not as good as the long-discontinued ChromaTabs, which used colours sampled from the favicon, but it still provides some visual distinction (I keep threatening to write my own extension that replicates the favicon behaviour, but I'm not a JS developer and it will probably never happen).

Foxy Gestures is another thing I can't live without, because I tried mouse gestures in a different browser a thousand years ago and now they're muscle memory. Unfortunately these don't work on internal pages or the addons site for security reasons.

Simple Translate lets me select any text on a page and click an icon to show a translation in a hovering box.

Stylus is for applying user styles; ViolentMonkey is for applying user scripts.
posted by confluency at 2:24 AM on December 13, 2023

Privacy Badger has a lot of overlap with uBlock origin, I think it is best to run either one or the other but not both.

A few more options here
posted by Lanark at 4:26 AM on December 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

As mentioned above, "Enhancer for YouTube" will:
- block ads (occasional arms-race lately with YT, but still works 99%)
- let you speed up videos (just want fix thing now hurry up tell me slow talker)
- let you slow down videos (old man can't read aside text joke fast enough)
- remove title cards (thing on screen block thing actually want look at why)
posted by kiblinger at 9:11 AM on December 13, 2023

Library Extension pops up a window whenever you open an Amazon/Goodreads link. In that window are links to the current item at any of 3200 libraries worldwide.
posted by Jesse the K at 2:43 PM on December 13, 2023 [2 favorites]