Firefox is probably the best general-purpose browser available right now. It’s what I use1, so all of my recommendations are for it. Most of these extensions are probably available for Chromium-based browsers too, I don’t know, haven’t checked.
If you specifically need, want, or desire a Chromium-based browser, I recommend Ungoogled Chromium, which is a project that makes the minimum changes necessary to decouple Chromium from Google. I strongly recommend against Brave4 and Opera GX5, and weakly recommend against Vivaldi6.
Top recommendations
uBlock Origin
https://addons.mozil … addon/ublock-origin/
Seriously, if you aren’t using uBlock Origin, you’re having an objectively worse experience online. uBlock Origin is a general-purpose content blocker. By default it only blocks advertising, but you can right-click on anything on any2 webpage, click “Block element”, play with a couple of sliders until it highlights exactly what you want gone, and it’ll never bother you again.
Form History Control (II)
https://addons.mozil … orm-history-control/
Ever found yourself typing into a web form and then the page refreshes, or the browser crashes, or something else happens that makes you lose all your work? FHC saves what you’re typing as you type it so you can recover it later. Personally, I think this should be the default behaviour for every web browser, but it isn’t, so this extension exists.
ViolentMonkey
https://addons.mozil … addon/violentmonkey/
Back in the day, GreaseMonkey introduced the concept of “userscripts” which are tiny extensions written in JavaScript that do specific things on specific pages. Anyone can write a userscript and publish it, the barrier to entry is ridiculously low. TamperMonkey improved on it, and ViolentMonkey improved still further. While they’re all still sporadically updated, ViolentMonkey is the one that’s in most active development, and in my own unscientific tests performed the best of the three.
If you want to see what kinds of userscript are available, there are lots of sources online, but the one I seem to keep going back to is https://greasyfork.org/en (you don’t need ViolentMonkey to browse available scripts).
The other extensions I use, in no particular order
- SponsorBlock and DeArrow: SponsorBlock cuts out sponsor segments in YouTube videos, and DeArrow3 replaces clickbaity thumbnails and titles with more neutral ones.
- Copy Selected Links: Got a page of links and just want the URLs? Click and drag to select the links, then right-click and choose Copy Selected Links.
- Don’t Fuck With Paste: Stops webpages from disabling Ctrl+V.
- Image Max URL: Right-click on any image to find the biggest version of that image readily available.
- Invert Colours: Some webpages force themselves into light mode or dark mode. This adds a handy little button to your address bar that’ll let you invert the colours of an entire page. Great for places like Steam if you, like me, need light to see.
- Consent-O-Matic: The default option for the vast majority of cookie popups is to “agree” to be tracked. Even if you get past that, you might find some companies claim they have a “legitimate interest”, and the default may be to permit those even if you choose “don’t agree”. This extension is the solution: set it up once and it’ll automatically answer those popups on your behalf.
Footnotes
- Actually, that’s not true. I use LibreWolf which is an opinionated fork of Firefox with most of the antifeatures removed. However, the onboarding flow isn’t very good. For one thing, LibreWolf defaults to extreme paranoia, with the expectation that you relax its settings where needed. This includes things like forgetting all your data every time you close it by default, and this isn’t mentioned anywhere. So you could spend a while setting websites up exactly as you want them, logging in everywhere, only for LibreWolf to happily undo all your work next launch if you didn’t tell it to remember everything. I know people on the whole aren’t willing to trade quite so much convenience for the increase in privacy, so Firefox is probably the best choice for general use. ↩
- By default, a small selection of highly sensitive webpages disable all extensions, including Firefox’s browser add-ons catalogue. You can choose “Run on sites with restrictions” for each extension you install to change this behaviour, but those sites are on the list for a reason and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it. ↩
- DeArrow’s server-side thumbnail processing costs the developer money. To partially offset this, you’ll be asked to make a small one-time donation to use DeArrow. You can use it for free by visiting https://dearrow.ajay.app/free/ once after installation. ↩
- No, really, don’t use Brave. TL;DR: it’s run by a homophobic AI- and crypto-bro and has really terrible history involving allegations of impersonation and fraud, fuck knows what they’re doing these days, I haven’t checked. ↩
- Stop using Opera Browser and Opera GX. TL;DR: Opera GX is a trend-chasing crypto-positive AI-encumbered browser. The company promoted predatory loans to people in developing countries, and on another occasion put a screamer in their browser startup - when told they were triggering users’ PTSD, the official response was “chill brah it’s only for one day”. ↩
- Vivaldi seems fine™, but the problem is it’s not open source, so nobody can really be sure what it’s doing under the hood. Also they took an open source project (Chromium) and made it closed source, and whatever else they’re up to, that’s a dick move. ↩