What are Your Favorite Browser Extensions?

I have been a longtime fan of browser extensions. They make my life easier, fulfill specific tasks not available natively in the browser, and they allow some level of customization. I thought I would make a thread here to talk about extensions. Feel free to list your favorites, a link, what the extension does, and other information you may find pertinent such as what browser you are using.

My primary browser is Firefox all listed extensions can be found in the Firefox Add-Ons section.

1Password - My password manager of choice. I have used several in the past including Dashlane, Lastpass, and Bitwarden. None of these others have the polish and features 1password has for my workflow. My only negative against 1Password is that it is closed source and they offer no free plan. If you are okay with something more basic and prefer open source Bitwarden is a great alternative. Dashlane has changed their pricing model and is wildly overpriced imo and Lastpass is owned by LogMeIn who does not have the best track record when it comes to a company I want handling my most sensitive information.

ClearURLs - This extension removes tracking elements from URL’s. Many websites use tracking elements in the URL (e.g. example.con?utm_source=newsletter1&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=sale) to mark your online activity. All that tracking code is not necessary for a website to be displayed or work correctly and can therefore be removed—that is exactly what ClearURLs does.

I don’t care about cookies - The EU regulations require that any website using tracking cookies must get user’s permission before installing them. These warnings appear on most websites until the visitor agrees with the website’s terms and conditions. This add-on will remove these cookie warnings from almost all websites. My browser settings prevent them from being saved after the session ends.

uBlock Origin - The end all be all of content blockers. No other extension comes close to what ublock can do. Allows you to block ads, content, 3rd party scripts, and much more. You can customize uBlock Origin to your hearts content add specific filters, whitelists, blacklists, and custom lists.

Enhancer for YouTube - If you watch a ton of youtube videos like me this extension is a must imo. This extension can manage ads as you wish, control the playback speed, default volume level, automate repetitive tasks such as selecting the appropriate playback quality, configure dozens of keyboard shortcuts to control YouTube like a pro, and much more.

SponsorBlock for YouTube - SponsorBlock lets you skip over sponsors, intros, outros, subscription reminders, and other annoying parts of YouTube videos. SponsorBlock is a crowdsourced browser extension that let’s anyone submit the start and end time’s of sponsored segments and other segments of YouTube videos. Once one person submits this information, everyone else with this extension will skip right over the sponsored segment. This extension coupled with uBlock Origin and Enhancer for Youtube is the best way to watch Youtube imo.

Dark Reader - This eye-care extension enables night mode creating dark themes for websites on the fly. Dark Reader inverts bright colors making them high contrast and easy to read at night.You can adjust brightness, contrast, sepia filter, dark mode, font settings and ignore-list. I get migraines all the time and bright screens kill my eyes. I love this extension and try to make everything dark if possible using this.

Stylus - Stylus is my backup for Dark Reader. Some sites which are coded strangely like Amazon do not play will with dynamic dark filters like Dark Reader uses. In that case Stylus is a great choice letting you redesign your favorite websites. An actively developed and community driven userstyles manager. Easily install custom themes from popular online repositories, or create, edit, and manage your own personalized CSS stylesheets. (*Beware of a similar extension called Stylish which does something similar, but was bought out by a third party and now contains spyware.)

BetterTTV - If you watch a lot of content on Twitch this extension is a must. BetterTTV enhances Twitch with Extra emoticons - BetterTTV global and per-channel emotes, Username/Word/Phrase highlighting, Word/Phrase blacklist, Split chat lines for easy reading, See deleted links and messages, Anon Chat - join a channel without showing in the user list, and Hide visual noise like bits.

Keepa - Amazon Price Tracker - Amazon Price History charts even for different versions, colors, or sizes of a product. Set up a price watch directly from the product page and get price alerts.

Reddit Enhancement Suite - Reddit Enhancement Suite is a community-driven unofficial browser extension for Reddit. Primarily all support is for all old reddit. Offers very little functionality if you are on new reddit redesign.

Violentmonkey - Violentmonkey provides userscripts support for browsers. It works on browsers with WebExtensions support. This is a very powerful extension that allows you to add customer userscripts. My most commonly used is for reddit to show twitter embeds and twitch for ad blocking. Thousands of possibilites with this app.

View Image - View Image adds the “Search by Image” and “View Image” buttons back to the google images results page.

The remaining extensions are for Firefox only:

Firefox Multi-Account Containers - It separates website storage into tab-specific Containers. Cookies downloaded by one Container are not available to other Containers. With the Firefox Multi-Account Containers extension you can sign in to two different accounts on the same site (for example, you could sign in to work email and home email in two different Container tabs. Avoid leaving social-network footprints all over the web (for example, you could use a Container tab for signing in to a social network, and use a different tab for visiting online news sites, keeping your social identity separate from tracking scripts on news sites)

Facebook Container - I am not a Facebook or Instagram user, but opening either site will automatically open them in this container. Facebook Container works by isolating your Facebook identity into a separate container that makes it harder for Facebook to track your visits to other websites with third-party cookies.

Honorable mentions include Decentraleyes, LocalCDN, and HTTPS Everywhere. All are privacy focused extensions but Firefox now natively does the functions of each one so they are no longer needed. I am a fairly privacy focused person and have done my best to choose extensions which have a clear privacy policy and do not require any information more than what is needed for the extension to function. Feel free to list your favorites.

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That’s a lot of extensions. Do you notice any browser performance impacts with so many extensions loaded?

Never, I use Firefox though so a chromium based browser may have more hangups. My main pc also has 32gb of ram so never noticed anything if it did make an impact.

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome

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I also use Keepa for my amazon purchases

It gives you a nice graph of the price history for whatever item you are looking at.

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In Firefox I started running this and seems the same.