After the recent Firefox update I decided to go through my plugins and sort out ones I no longer need, use those more that are really helpful and find some new ones.
Most of the plugins I use are also available for mobile and other browsers.
Here is my current list:
Privacy & fast, ad-free Browsing (mostly inspired by Prism-Break)
Privacy Badger - blocks all kind of trackers on websites. E.g. on the Fairphone Forum I block G%§$e Analytics.
uBlock Origin - blocks ads and lets you personalize any website and giving it a cleaner design by blocking any element you don’t like. E.g. at the forum login page I block the social media login buttons. (I don’t need it on mobile because I use AdAway as a system wide ad blocker.)
Location Guard - adds noise to your location so websites can’t track your location accurately while still being able to provide you with relevant local content.
Multi Account Containers - I love this one. Create color-coded containters for your websites, so the websites you use for work don’t know on which sites you shop and your social networks don’t know about your banking sites.
HTTPS Everywhere - always use the secure https connection instead of http
Disconnect - another plugin that blocks some shady stuff. @Roboe recommends FF’s own tracking protection instead.
Cloud Firewall - blocks sites and content on clouds of big evil tech companies.
I also used a Cookie-Killer for a while, but FF can do that pretty well on it’s own. I use uBlock to block the annoying “this site relies on cookies”-warning.
Other:
Wikipedia Peek - shows short previews of other Wikipedia articles if you hover over a link. Also works for the languages on the sidebar which I like very much because I often use Wikipedia to find a translation - it often works better than any dictionary.
Fox Replace - I use it to replace G%§$e and Drumpf in texts.
Emoji Cheatsheet - I use it to quickly add flag-tags to topics until we find a better alternative to indicate languages (discuss here).
Legacy Extension I haven’t found a replacement for yet
Menu Wizard - let’s you clean up the right click menu. E.g. I used it to remove the “back” function which I often clicked by mistake.
PS: One more plugin I miss is the dictionary switcher.
Before the update I had a plugin that automatically switched between english and german spell-checking after writing a few words in the language. Now I have to right-click -> Languages and manually pick the right language e.g. when switching between english and german topics on the forum.
So what plugins do you use?
And does anybody have an opinion on whether some of the privacy plugins are overkill because they have overlapping functions?
Drop Disconnect and enable Firefox’s embedded tracking protection (which is based on Disconnect’s list of trackers). It should be in Preferences — Privacy and Security in latest Firefox, but you can enable it in older versions (Firefox ESR) from about:config → Search for privacy.trackingprotection.enabled → Set it to true.
The rest is basically my setup for privacy. Instead of your goodies I use my own webextensions (don’t want to spam, and they are very specific or Spanish-related). I don’t need Wikipedia Peek because I already enabled the experimental feature in my own Wikimedia account, but it is a good catch,
For AdAway I recommend adding one of these host files to sources (specially if you are replacing uBlock Origin):
Thanks. I dropped Disconnect (FF’s tracking protection was already enabled) and I added https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/alternates/fakenews-gambling-porn-social/hosts to AdAway. AdAway now says 4/4 hosts files applied, but under hosts sources it says “Local: not available, Online: not available” for this one.
I copied the url so I’m sure I didn’t make a scribal error.
I don’t often print the internet … but when I do, I can hide or delete the unnecessary or annoying parts I don’t want on paper on-the-fly with Print Edit.
Firefox has screenshot capability built in for quite a while, with Firefox 56+ (yes, it came with 56) you get the “Firefox Screenshots” tool now.
But Fireshot (was easier and faster than the developer console and now still) has more options of what to do with the screenshot, so until the Firefox tool can at least just copy the screenshot to the clipboard … I use FireShot.
There’s some (free to use) HTML stuff from outside I need to display from inside a HTML+JavaScript page of mine, and since only recently, the (still free to use) HTML stuff comes with X-Frame options to prevent displaying it via iframe and such, breaking my nice display frame.
So instead of lazy me rewriting my lazy code, this Add-on saves the day the easy way … until I have too much time on my hands or disaster strikes.
I use Adblock for Firefox, because it lets you enable ads on specific chosen YouTube-channels. I like that, because now I can support my favourite channels
Additionally I would use some kind of Java Script blocker and allow scripts only side by side if needed.
In the past I used No-Script since a month I use uMatrix instead. I personally think it provides a much better granularity or at least a much better overview (tidied up interface) in comparsion to No-Script.
Here the list of FF Add-Ons I currently use:
CanvasBlocker
Cookie AutoDelete
Decentraleyes
Privacy Settings (I still use ESR and not yet v57 in v57 it is not yet available)
SmartHTTPS (basically does the same like HTTPS Anywhere)
I also use Miniflux as self-hosted RSS reader and LessnMore as another url shortener, but they don’t have add-ons for Firefox, but use Bookmarklets instead.
… until I have too much time on my hands or disaster strikes.
