posted on Wed, Dec 26 '18 under tag: mozilla

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:

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.