Usability
- Kill Sticky: Kill off the annoying floating things blocking the website you're trying to see.
- Tranquility Reader: Like native "reader view" but compatible with other addons and more options.
- Scroll Zoom: Zoom web pages with the left or right mouse button and the scroll wheel.
Image / Video
- Image Max URL: Finds larger/original versions of images (supporting 8800+ websites), including a powerful image popup feature
- Invert Image: The add-on inverts color of an image or color of any part of a page. Changes white color to black, for comfortable night time reading.
- Save webP as PNG or JPEG: Convert any image (WebP, AVIF, etc.) to PNG or JPEG (with choice of quality) for downloading.
- TinEye Reverse Image Search: Click on any image on the web to search for it on TinEye.
- Video Speed Controller: Speed up, slow down, advance and rewind any HTML5 video with quick shortcuts.
- Enhancer for YouTube™: Take control of YouTube and boost your user experience!
Tools
- EPUBReader: Read ePub files right in Firefox. No additional software needed!
- WebStickies: (Persistent) Sticky notes for the Internet
RSS
- RSSHub Radar: RSSHub Radar is a spin-off of RSSHub that helps you quickly discover and subscribe to RSS and RSSHub for your current site.
- RSSPreview: Preview RSS feeds in-browser
Customization
- Stylus: Redesign your favorite websites with Stylus, an actively developed and community driven userstyles manager.
- Tampermonkey: Tampermonkey is the world's most popular userscript manager.
Advanced
- Request Control: An extension for controlling requests. See also Redirector, not as powerful, but much more user friendly.
- Modify Header Value (HTTP Headers): Add, modify or remove a header for any request on desired domains. I use this one to force sites to load only the image when opening images in new tabs.
- Cookie AutoDelete: Control your cookies! This WebExtension is inspired by Self Destructing Cookies. When a tab closes, any cookies not being used are automatically deleted. Keep the ones you trust (forever/until restart) while deleting the rest. Containers Supported
- uBlock Origin: Finally, an efficient wide-spectrum content blocker. Easy on CPU and memory.
- uMatrix: [EDIT-WARNING: as pointed by @sovietknuckles@hexbear.net, uMatrix it's not longer maintained since 2021] Point & click to forbid/allow any class of requests made by your browser. Use it to block scripts, iframes, ads, facebook, etc.
Use ViolentMonkey it's open source and actively developed for Firefox, while TamperMonkey is originally developed for chrome
Thanks for the advice!
Sadly, I knew about that too late and I'm a heavy user of Tampermonkey. It would be painful to migrate now :(.
Thanks!
Links for convenience:
I will definitivaly use the last 2 ones. I don't usually need to mass download images, but it's good to know the Bazzacuda one exists!
One question... do you know if it works with videos?
I don't see anything on the addon page, but it seems weird because the use case is very similar.
I think I don't undestand it properly.
What I meant is: if I have some tabs with one video URL* in each of them, it seems trivial to just automate a "click download" for each one of them.
* I mean plain MP4 normal URLs with no tricks, like imgur MP4 URLS:
- https://i.imgur.com/fsX4bq6.mp4
- https://i.imgur.com/nAu2ifG.mp4
I cannot answer that properly, I don't really understand them enough. I will add some copy-pasted answer on bottom. But, from a user perspective my experience is:
- uBlock origin: blocks a lot of (but not all) unwanted stuff without breaking (almost) anything. When some page does not work, tt's very uncommon that uBlock origin is the cause.
- uMatrix: blocks (almost) all unwanted stuff, but it breaks many pages by default. If a page does not work, the first thing I look at is uMatrix.
- NoScript (and similar): It's been some time since I used it (so those who are more familiar, please correct me if I'm wrong). What I remember is that it was even more strict than uMatrix. Something like uMatrix allows by default everything from the same domain as the URL but NoScript does not.
So I would recommend uBlock origin always and uMatrix only if you are ok with some micro-management page-by-page.
Here it's a copy-paste of the answer from the first link in the google search ublock umatrix differences:
Chris's Wiki :: blog/web/UBlockOriginAndUMatrix
While it's true that uMatrix and uBlock Origin have overlapping functionality (and are written by the same person), they have different purposes and focuses. uBlock Origin's focus is blocking ads and other undesired things as an out of the box experience with little configuration needed. uMatrix's focus is on exerting tight and highly specific control over what resources a page is allowed to load and use, including Javascript and cookies (and requires a lot of configuration).
People still use uMatrix? gorhill archived the uMatrix repo/stopped maintaining it in 2021.
Oh, I had forgotten, I'm going to add a warning to my comment thanks for noticing!
When I was aware of that, I expected it to break at some point. But I didn't find a proper replacement... and it still seems to be working fine.
Thanks! These seem useful. I've only used a couple add-ons from your list. Time to try them out now.
Your are awesome for adding links too!
ublock obviously should be installed on Firefox by default. But I seem to have a host of privacy add-ons that break few-to-no websites.
- Privacy Possum , which blocks certain tracking headers/js. Privacy Badger by the EFF is an acceptable alternative but I've personally found it doesn't block quite as much.
- NoScript Honestly my favourite addon of all time. You can operate in block-everything mode and just allow javascript/HTML5 from sites you trust, or if you're lazy then just operate in allow-everything mode and every now and then set crummy sites to untrusted (looking at you google tag manager). In block-everything-by-default mode, this add-on will break some sites, but the UI is so easy it's a couple of clicks to trust all the sites in a tab and auto-refresh.
Be warned - If you're not privacy conscious, you might cry from seeing the hundreds of sites that are running javascript on your machine without asking.
- User-Agent Switcher Really easy add-on to just leave on and misdirect sites. Never caused me a single problem, and in fact is useful when sites (looking at you Microsoft Teams) claim they don't work in Firefox and refuse to load but actually work fine if you use this addon and pretend to be Chrome.
- Sponsorblock kicks ass. 30 hours of ads skipped in half a year.
And my personal silly couple ones:
- Wikipedia Vector Skin because I'm an old fuddy duddy and I like old Wikipedia.
- Cat-In-Tab because I'm also an old fuddy-duddy that likes whimsy sometimes. This is just silly but I like it.
I really like consent-o-matic on firefox. You can set your cookie level to (dis)allow, and it goes through them automatically when you land on a site.
There is "i dont care about cookies", but I do care, I dont want your cookies and I dont want to go through your dark patterns!
I don't get it. So, it will save my cookies, keeping my logins are safe. But it will reject the site's cookies that they want to store for trackers?
Exactly, if that's what you set it to. Opting out is made extremely hard on many sites. This addon fixes that
tree style tabs / sidebery. it's life changing to be able to organize your tabs and actually read the titles.
I don't think any ad blocker can match what uBlock can do so efficiently.
Also, if you browse YouTube on your PC, then SponsorBlock & DeArrow are must haves.
clickbait remover for YouTube.. it replaces thumbnails with an actual frame from the video
Blocktube. Simple and advanced blocking of videos on youtube. Worth getting. Also stops youtube from auto pasuing after having watched a while.
Consent-o-matic. Set your preferences and it will automatically click those specific preferences when you visit a website, where it recognizes the cookie accept popup. No more need to click accept all, to move on. (It does not know all types of cookie pop ups, but it knoes the ones used by a large chunk of websites)
Imagus. Mouse over an image and this extension will attempt to show it (on your mouse location) in larger size. This works great for various things. News articles, social media etc. It can even do it for video and gifs. It can be annoying in some cases but.. ive gotten used to it. I used to use it on reddit. Just mouse over the posts titles and the pic would pop up. And as said before, super nice for articles and photo albums etc
Nice Suggestion.
DeArrow is a similar extension from the creator of SponsorBlock.
He has highlighted the differences between the two in the description:
-
Unlike Clickbait Remover, DeArrow's main purpose is for crowdsourcing better titles and thumbnails
-
When a crowdsourced title is not available, DeArrow will auto-format it according to your setting, but does it in a more sophisticated way than Clickbait Remover. Instead of only setting all words to lower case, or capitalizing every word, DeArrow supports casing systems such as "Title Case" and "Sentence case". These will still allow acronyms and proper names to remain capitalized.
-
When a crowdsourced thumbnail is not available, DeArrow by default shows a screenshot at a random timestamp in the video. Clickbait Remover's thumbnails use YouTube auto-generated thumbnails, and while they are seemingly random, they are chosen by a machine learning algorithm to favor faces with expressions, and other overstimulating features. DeArrow uses truly random timestamps generated by its own server. DeArrow will also check the SponsorBlock database to ensure the randomized thumbnail is not inside of a sponsor segment.
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Alternative Thumbnails is a feature available in the latest ReX patches.
ReX is a fork of the discontinued Revanced Extended project, which in itself was a fork of the official Revanced project.
I applied these patches using the Revanced Extended Manager on YouTube 18.33.37
Screenshots:
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Here it is in action:
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Dude this is dope, but I don't know if it is worth making the change for that feature alone, if I lose the patch of my YT again I'll try it!
I'm using the root way.
Thanks for the heads-up.
I've been trying this for 2 days now. I would say this works. The simple, boring thumbnails do not trick my brain into clicking the video.
if I lose the patch of my YT again
You can export/import:
- Applied patches from ReVanced managers:
Settings > Export patches selection - In-app ReVanced settings:
Profile Picture > Settings > ReVanced Extended > Miscellaneous > Import/Export > Export settings - SponsorBlock profile:
Profile Picture > Settings > Sponsor Block > (scroll all the way down) > Import/Export > (select and copy all the text) > (save this copied text in a text file OR pin it in your keyboard's clipboard) > (Now Go to new app and paste in Import)
I switched from ReVanced Extended (RVX) to ReX using my exported settings. Doing it this way makes switching APKs a breeze.
Ok, I don't think we are using the same client because I definitely don't have a profile picture, I am using this version.
- Applied patches from ReVanced managers:
- uBlock Origin: On medium mode. Honestly, the internet mostly sucks without this excellent extension.
- Dark Reader: Easy on your eyes and prolongs battery life on OLED displays.
- Redirector: This allows you to be in full control of which sites/urls you redirect and to where. As it allows the use of regex, you're even able to create your own 'bangs'. For example I used !x as a bang to redirect me to my favorite SearXNG instance. Kinda neat.
- uBlock Origin (medium mode)
- Dark Reader
- Video Speed Controller
A couple that aren't already mentioned by others:
- FeedBro RSS Reader
- Don't Track Me Google - prevents google from replacing its search results and other links with redirect URLs
- Vimium - Vim style keybinds to navigate pages
Swift Selection Search is really useful. Highlight text on a page and you get a pop up with your search engines to quick search or you can copy the text to your clipboard.
I discovered this last week. It's such a handy tool for quick searches. I wished I had known about this earlier.
There are some awesome suggestions made by people here. Never heard before extensions that may come handy someday, that would otherwise require third party apps to do the same task.
Also, save the following two posts as well. I didn't notice similar posts were already created earlier.
Dark Reader alone might be the only reason I'm willing to ditch Chrome for FF in Android lol.
Aside from the usual security & blocking, there is
- Behind The Overlay Revival
- Chameleon
- Color Changer
- Image extract
- JPEG XL viewer
- PassLok Image Steganography wonder where I've used that?
- Redirect AMP to HTML
- Save Screenshot
- SVG Export
Behind The Overlay Revival
This looks very similar to Kill Sticky. If, by any chance, you have tried both, do you know what the differences are?
Thanks!
I haven't used Kill Sticky but they clearly look similar in effect.
I've been looking for something that does exactly what Behind The Overlay Revival does, so thank you!
Thanks. These seem useful utilities that may come handy. Also, an alternative to Chameleon is User-agent Switch as suggested by SootyChimney.
How does the image created by PassLok Image Steganography work on the receiver's end? Do they need to have the same extension installed?
Thanks for the U-a Switch heads-up.
They don't need the extension if they can reach the webpage and don't mind eavesdroppers. It means I can pack much more into my bio if it's packed into my avatar instead.
