Category: Firefox

As much as i dislike Mozilla i'm still forced to recommend Firefox for those who care about their privacy, though a lot of tweaking is necessary to beat it into submission. I've also kind of boxed myself in since i depend on quite a few add-ons for Firefox. I often browse the Mozilla Add-ons website (AMO) to keep track of what's new, though the vast majority of add-ons are worthless or, worse, contain malware which i define as anything containing data harvesting functionality, ads, coupon related add-ons, or anything else that isn't required for the stated purpose of the add-on.

The M&M's (Morons at Mozilla) neutered the functionality of the AMO website by both removing the RSS feed functionality and limiting the sorting options, however one can still sort add-ons by the number of users and doing so reveals some interesting selections. Here's the list of add-ons with 1 millions users or greater and my comments on them:

• uBlock Origin, 5,968,728 users: uBlock Origin (uBO) is literally the only one on the list that's actually worth installing. uBO is an excellent content blocker and though it can be installed on Chromium and it's derivatives, it only offers full functionality on Firefox.
• Adblock Plus, 4,870,451 users: Now there's a great idea; let's get rich by making an "ad blocking" add-on which allows ads by default and then charge advertises to have their ads whitelisted!
• Easy Screenshot, 3,659,589 users: This ding-dong developer uses the official sounding name 'Mozilla Online' but is located in China. See how easy it is to fool nearly 4 million gullible people by sticking 'Mozilla' in your user name?
• Video DownloadHelper, 1,941,350 users: Let's nag users for money and not let them know about yt-dlp, a far better solution.
• AdBlocker Ultimate, 1,872,164 users: Well, at least this one claims to black all ads, but it isn't uBlock.
• DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials,1,605,557 users: 'DuckDuckGo' (possibly the dumbest name for a search engine ever) and 'privacy' do not belong in the same sentence. DuckDuckGo, which is little more than a proxy for Bing, has been caught more than once violating user trust and they not only censor their own search results, but have convinced the idiots at Bing to do so also.
• Cisco Webex Extension, 1,463,112 users: This privacy hating piece of garbage is for video meetings. Read their "privacy" policy and then run away.
• Facebook Container, 1,227,098 users: What can i say. Facebook? Really? Disregarding the insidious assault on privacy that people using Facebook subject themselves to (as well as the rest of us non-Facebook users), containerized or not, Firefox already has the tools built-in. Open its preferences and set Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) to Strict and learn how to set exceptions.
• Ghostery - Privacy Ad Blocker, 1,119,088 users: Enable privacy.resistFingerprinting (RFP) in about:config, set ETP to Strict as already mentioned, and forget about Ghostery. Better yet, use the 'arkenfox' user.js.
• AdBlock for Firefox, 1,070,688 users: Again, pales in comparison to uBlock, however it is nice to see 4 ad/content blocking add-ons among the most popular. PS: remember that time when Mozilla forgot to renew its add-on signing certificate?
• Privacy Badger,1,046,527 users: Unnecessary with ETP, RFP, uBlock and the 'arkenfox' user.js.

Raymond Hill, the developer of uMatrix, has essentially put the project into hibernation. Enter xiMatrix by 'xi', a continuation of uM with some twists. Here's the AMO page and here's the git repo page.

Currently i'm not using it so i can't really comment on it, but i am keeping an eye on it's development.

Wouldn't it be super handy if you could stick whatever you wanted on Firefox's New Tab page? That's exactly what Mark-It by Matt allows.

Mark-It turns your New Tab page into a text editor that supports markdown. I use it to store commonly used bookmarks, notes and bits of text that i often paste in forums and comments.

Mark-It is not super polished and it doesn't support all of the markdown syntax, but it is simple and it gets the job done.

Prior to Marl-It i was using Clippings until i realized that the developer is injecting quite a bit of CSS into every page you visit for no good reason. While Clippings has more features than Mark-It, i believe it could make the browser much easier to fingerprint and so it's a poor choice for anyone that cares about privacy. Besides, the fewer add-ons, the better.

'icpantsparti2', slapped up a very nice GUI companion for the 'arkenfox' user.js which features searching and filtering. This should make working with the user.js a lot easier, especially for new users.