December 2018 - What extensions do I use in my Firefox
Firefox extensions add useful functionality that saves time
I just read Ludovic’s post about which Firefox extensions they have. Here are the extensions installed on my firefox desktop that I use extensively. In alphabetic order.
Auto Tab Discard
Automatically sends tabs I have not visited in past n minutes (n=10 for me) into a suspended state (like they are when you reopen firefox after closing it with a lot of tabs). This lets me have thousands of tabs open but still run light on memory. The snoozed tabs are automatically activated when I come back to them.
Behind The Overlay Revival
I have not used this extensively, but it closes annoying popups on websites with a simple click in the URL bar
ColorZilla
Installed this recently to pick a colour from a PDF to reproduce it in word processing software
Firefox Multi-Account Containers
This is a godsend extension by Mozilla themselves (which graduated out of TestPilot) that allows me to have different containers for different accounts on same website. For example, I have a “Work” container in which I am logged in to google, twitter, etc as my organization. I open a tab in this container whenever I want to do some work related activity.
Ghostery
Ghostery is my ad-blocker of choice (for now)
HTTPS Everywhere
This simple add-on automatically redirects popular websites that support https to their https version. Silently runs in the background.
Mastodon Simplified Federation
I installed this yesterday because entering my mastodon account details for following people was quickly becoming a pain when I discovered Trunk
Modify Header Value
There are many add-ons that does this. I wanted this feature because there were sites that would block content unless you entered the site through google search. I set a ‘referer’ header on those sites with value ‘https://www.google.com’ and easily got through.
TestPilot
I regularly run interesting experiments through Test Pilot. Currently I have:
- Email Tabs - which I used exactly once after installing
- Firefox Color - also which I used exactly once in a Firefox release party to show off
Unpaywall
Although I have open access button installed as well, it is unpaywall which effortlessly puts a link to legal full text PDF on journals that insist on logging in for accessing content.
Vimium
I don’t like to use my laptop’s touchpad. I don’t like to use mouse either. Vimium makes it possible to browse the entire web with just keyboard.
Wayback Machine
I got this from Ludovic’s post and just installed. The power of wayback machine automatically.
Zotero Connector
Best reference management tool ever.