Cool and Useful Firefox Add-ons I Use Daily

Hi there, Firefox is an open-source and nonprofit browser that lets its users customize and tweak the browser too deeply. Even the anonymous ‘Tor Browser' is based on Firefox ESR code. Firefox already has most tools that are required for a normal user to browse the web efficiently. But still using some add-ons provides additional features and user control over the existing ones.

By using these add-ons I recommend, you can have a clean and fast web experience on Firefox.

1. uBlock Origin

A widely used free and open-source content blocker. It effectively eliminates ads and trackers on every webpage, including popular sites like YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, etc. It supports dynamic and cosmetic filtering. As user's wish they can add custom filters too.

Features

  1. Element Zapper allows to temporarily remove page elements
  2. Element Picker allows to permanently remove page elements
  3. Cosmetic filtering
  4. Disables prefetching of resources and hyperlink auditing
  5. Can block media files (images) on a website.
  6. Optionally blocks remote fonts.
  7. Can be used to disable JavaScript
  8. Easy on CPU.
  9. Supports custom filter lists.

Because of the effectiveness and wide use of this content blocker by google chrome users, Google killed it from their chromium browsers using Manifest V3. Imagine how powerful the addon is; even Google (a monopoly) is shocked by how this addon works.

Meanwhile, certain chromium based browser's like Brave decided to kept it as long as possible by hosting it themselves. Ungoogled chromium still allows to sideload/install uBlock Origin from third-party websites, but don't sure how longer it will work as they depended upon a chrome flag that official removed by google long ago.

Sponsorblock

Used to skip sponsorship segments on YouTube videos. Works as simply as an ad blocker. The sponsor segments are submitted by SponsorBlock users.

Features

  1. Blocks various categories
    • Sponsored segments.
    • Repetitive intros/opening animations.
    • Outros/credits.
    • Self-promotion.
    • Interaction reminders.
    • Previews/recaps.
    • Non-music sections.
    • Filler.
  2. Choose which categories to skip.
  3. Different actions per category.
  4. Automatic skip
  5. Shows notification on skips.
  6. Skip behavior customization — configure how aggressively segments are skipped.
  7. Color separated categories.
  8. SponsorBlock markers on the video progress bar.

AI block for YouTube

Nowadays AI is everywhere. Especially on YouTube there is too much AI-related stuffs like summaries, insights, and videos/shorts made using AI.

YouTube is a well-known and largely used platform by content creators. So switching to another platform is simply not a solution. So this addon fixes the AI related problems on YouTube.

  1. Helps you to bypass the AI slop on YouTube by hiding AI-generated videos from homepage, search results, recommendations, etc.
  2. You can choose to hide such videos completely or just show a warning.
  3. AI flagged videos are submitted by users.

Limitations

  1. currently only supports long-form videos; doesn't work for Shorts.

Disable AI

  1. A simple addon that disables all AI features from all major search engines Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, etc.
  2. By disabling most AI related stuffs on the internet, you are actually preventing AI from processing too much water and electricity.
Google, Yahoo and Bing are not recommended to use. DuckDuckGo and Brave allow you to disable AI features directly in settings.

Tampermonkey

An effective and widely used addon, which helps you to install and manage various userscripts.

  1. manage and edit all your userscripts
  2. Enable or disable scripts with 1 click.
  3. Easily backup scripts using in-built backup functionality.
  4. search scripts from userscripts.org by URL (with TamperFire enabled)
  5. Also search for userscripts in GreasyFork, OpenUserJS, GitHub, etc.
only install trusted scripts from verified sources (mentioned above) only.

StreetPass for Mastodon

A completely open-source addon that helps you to find Mastodon users / profiles as you browse the web.

  1. When StreetPass detects a Mastodon profile link, it is automatically added to the collection so later the user can browse through the collected profile links.
  2. Makes it easy to find and follow Mastodon profiles.

How it works?

  1. Mastodon users verify themselves by adding a custom link to their personal site.
  2. StreetPass lets you know when you've found one of these links, and adds them to your StreetPass list.
  3. StreetPass will build a list of Mastodon users made up of the websites you go to.

Chrome Mask

Certain websites are specifically built for Chromium browsers (e.g., Google-owned websites). This website gives poor performance on Firefox-based browsers. In certain situations sites force you to be in a Chromium-based browser.

In such conditions, this addon becomes a great tool. It spoofs the Firefox browser to look like Chrome.

  1. This addons isn't enabled by default or can't be enabled for all sites at once, which is a good thing.
  2. You can switch it on in specific sites where Firefox is less compatible.

YouTube Tweaks

Another addon like Improve for YouTube or Unhook, but with more control. This addon helps you to customize your YouTube experience to the next level.

Features

  1. Change the number of videos per row/column.
  2. Customize video grid.
  3. Hide shorts, mixes, playlists, recommendations, etc.
  4. Change the homepage.
  5. Force the original audio track.

and more features.

All features are turned off by default.

Read Aloud

Are you tired of reading long blog posts or news and not having enough time to read full posts? Eye strain is a daily problem? If yes, then this addon helps you to solve all these struggles.

  1. Just by clicking on a button, it reads an entire webpage for you.
  2. It uses text-to-speech technology.
  3. It works on a variety of websites,
    • News sites.
    • Blogs.
    • Fan fiction.
    • Publications.
    • Textbooks.
    • Online universities.
    • Course materials.
  4. It also allows you to select from a variety of text-to-speech voices, including those provided natively by the browser, as well as by text-to-speech cloud service providers such as Google Wavenet, Amazon Polly, IBM Watson, and Microsoft.

Video Download Helper

A completely private and open-source addon that detects videos on websites and allows to download them directly and completely free.

  1. More than 1000 websites supported.
  2. Download Youtube videos.
  3. Offline viewing of live streams.
  4. Download videos in high-definition and convert them to preferred formats (MP4, MKV, WebM, etc.).
  5. Extract audio from videos, converting them into MP3s or podcasts.
  6. No tracking, data collection or advertisements.
  7. No download limit

Hope you guys found all the addons I mentioned useful. As I find more addons, it will be updated to this post.

Thank you for reading.