What are your favorite/preferred browser extensions/ add-ons?Firefox, Chrome. Primarily productivity focused. But other areas are fine, too. Also mention specific customizations of these, if any. Moderators, please edit suitably, as this is my first post here.
I use it instead of an adblocker, because it gives the effect I actually want from an adblocker: it stops people tracking me, without stopping responsible sites from making money from my visits by serving me adverts.
It's also able to allow requests without forwarding cookies, with some sane CDN defaults, so you can load third-party assets without allowing more-than-minimal tracking.
OneTab. It has serious issues, but I haven't found a replacement. Solves the problem of having so many tabs open. And solves my information addiction - usually after I OneTab it I tend not to care about it anymore (even though that wasn't my goal).
Most of my (Firefox) add-ons are privacy oriented. Besides from NoScript, Decentraleyes and Privacy Badger I also use AgentX to change the user-agent per site; simple, no bloat, and just works.
For anyone reading this, the user-agent switcher is not something to be over looked. If a drive-by-exploit is written for firefox and you are switched to IE... hey maybe they now try to apply an IE exploit and of course it won't work. Basically it is an extra layer to prevent browser specific exploits from being delivered.
Splits your many-tabbed Chrome window into two windows at your current tab. Useful for when I open up a bunch of tangential research pages and want them in their own window.
You can swap where you are searching easily. Maybe someday I will eventually add more sites, but no promises. It's open source here:
https://github.com/IanBurgan/SearchIT
* "It's All Text" -> edit any text input area in your favorite editor, since after all it's all text. Hope the author updates quickly to webextensions.
* "Easy Copy" -> many use cases, for example select relevant words in any page, copy as Markdown link (or other markup) and paste in your other editor. Easy to adapt to any sane markup language.
More and more sites do the right thing by default for their own resources, but by no means all. HTTPS Everywhere helps you avoid the TOFU hole, and also help for sites that try to load resources over http that they should load over https.
On Firefox, these are the ones I use in every installation (yes, they make me more productive):
uBlock Origin (ad blocker)
Privacy Badger (tracker blocker and ad blocker)
HTTPS Everywhere (forces https when available)
Perspectives (checks for certificate changes)
Cookie AutoDelete (the alternative WebExtension replacement for Self-destruct Cookies - deletes a tab’s cookies, local storage sometime after it’s closed)
Tab Mix Plus (the Swiss Army Knife of tab management)
Session Manager (save, restore windows/tabs - till date I haven’t found one that works as reliably as this one on Chrome)
Tree Style Tabs (display tabs as a hierarchical tree; place the tab bar on any side)
Link Alert (point the cursor at any link and know if it’ll open a new window or not, if it’s a PDF and many other things)
FoxClocks (configure several time zones and see the current time in those quickly)
FoxyProxy (switch proxy servers based on URL patterns or cycling through them with the toolbar button)
As someone who has always had 100+ tabs open at any moment, Tabs Ouliner for Chrome changed my life and freed up a TON of memory.
I downloaded the free version, played with it for 5 minutes, bought the $15 pro version, and am completely hooked. My guess is I’m averaging about 5 open tabs since picking up this extension, with the rest automatically filed so I actually go back to the ones I intended to go back to instead of just having them buried behind 30 other tabs in one of many browser windows.
I don’t know the dev, don’t have any connection to the app, but this is clearly how browsing was supposed to be.
My list is similar, though formerly I'd have said Cookie Controller.
I'm sad to be losing that, but I've been trying Cookies Autodelete on one of my machines and it seems a decent alternative. I look forward to seeing it mature a bit more.
I have a stock set that I use anytime I use Firefox or Chrome. They're there for security and privacy.
Adblock Plus
NoScript
Ghostery
Privacy Badger
I've also added HTTPS Anywhere lately.
For Firefox only, though, there's more.
I also use Forecastfox (fixed version) without the bottom notifications turned on, since I like being able to see the weather at a glance without having to grab my phone.
I also have a very old version of Copy Plain Text that I use for what it says on the tin.
Also some password generator, and a useragent switcher for testing/security, and referrers disabled for the same.
Yes, because Adblock Plus works. It's what I've always used. A lot of the wailing and gnashing over "zomg they can be bought!!!1one" was just misinformed users whining about discovering the "allow some non-intrusive advertising" option, which has been in ABP for quite a while now (and is completely optional).
I recently started using the WebMemex extensions. They are written by a friend from the Indieweb Community. Best way to save a snapshot (to "freeze dry") a website and have them in the browser cache for offline use. Lots of development still needed but it is pretty usable already.
I used to go totally over top and at one point had about 30-40 extensions, and Firefox looked a bit more like the Kerbal Space Program. Not sure what compelled me to do that, but I probably only used 2 or 3 them in practice.
Vimium + Visual mode, OneTab, Free Download Manager Chrome extension, Infinite Scroll for Google™, Nimbus Screenshot & Screen Video Recorder...and New Tab Draft is the best because it's the draft writing tool that I have to use every day.
Any reason why Ghostery over PrivacyBadger and Adguard over Ublock? I switched from ghostery once they added user accounts and there was some suspicion about them logging user data.
Tabs Backup and Restore for Chrome is very useful, if you are like me, and collect more and more tabs to "Read later". It will do periodic snapshots of all tabs, and you can restore any point in time.
First shameless self plug for whomever watches YouTube videos, Twitch streams, or consumes instagram via the web (twitter soon too) our Social Blade extension brings stats directly to the video/image page: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-blade/cfidk...
Beyond that here are a few others I like that I haven't seen mentioned:
I use it instead of an adblocker, because it gives the effect I actually want from an adblocker: it stops people tracking me, without stopping responsible sites from making money from my visits by serving me adverts.
It's also able to allow requests without forwarding cookies, with some sane CDN defaults, so you can load third-party assets without allowing more-than-minimal tracking.