I’m working to “refresh” my machines, and I’m curious about what folks recommend as far as (Firefox) browser extensions go. I mostly want to avoid surveillance capitalism, but any sort of general recommendations are welcome.
Bonus points for a “minimal” set for the average user combined with an “advanced” set for those more serious.
I currently use
ClearULS
Cookie AutoDelete
Decentraleyes
PrivacyBadger
uBlock Origin
Happy to hear about others I should be using or whether I should NOT be using some that I currently am, etc.
A lot of add ons are available and because your digital fingerprint seems to dependend on the number/types of add ons I’m curious to know as well, so thank you for starting this topic.
I recommend a password manager. I prefer Bitwarden. I also use Multi-account Containers to separate cookies in different domains, although Mozilla continues to bake more of that into Firefox itself.
I gave up on Decentraleyes and PrivacyBadger as mostly redundant.
I do know there’s a bit of an issue in that more add-ons often contribute to a more unique browser fingerprint.
I personally don’t use a password manager add-on, though I do make use of the Secrets app in GNOME.
I just figured this forum probably has people who are much more experienced/educated in these matters than I, so getting some opinions would be nice. Obviously I’ve tried Internet searches as well, but a lot of the resulting articles don’t actually seem that trustworthy
Yep, that’s a concern too. Which one (or maybe two) of these mentioned are most essential? I generally go for uBlock and maybe one or two more, but the fingerprinting issue is really annoying. Supposedly LibreWolf tries to fight that stuff, but for all I know using LibreWolf fingerprints you better because it’s rare…
It’s not like I’m SUPER concerned about being tracked but even taking reasonable measures to discourage these jerks is an unknown.
For a password manager you don’t need an extension, it’s a bit less convenient maybe to use say KeePassX (standalone app), but extensions have their own issues.
I also use addons to redirect common websites to privacy-respecting frontends, like Nitterify, which redirects Twitter links. I use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/, which can handle any URL pattern you want. I have it set for Imgur as well. Besides those, I use NoScript; although it’s sometimes a pain, the difference it makes for news websites is night and day.
Me too. By “secrets app” did you mean “Passwords and Keys” aka seahorse ? Anyway, I use seahorse
You can of course use Firefox itself as your password manager. However, if it’s the same as Thunderbird, the encryption technology used by Firefox is well short of best practice. Maybe OK for casual web sites like random forums but maybe not OK for internet banking.
For frequently used web sites, I find that wetware works as well as software.
I actually had that plugin installed on a browser used for junk stuff. As soon as that was announced, uninstalled.
Avast LOL no thanks… I mean what possible reason do they have to “buy” a plugin like that? You know something bad is coming, just like when practically any “leader” these days opens their mouth.
uBlock Origin, to block adds, tracking, and javascript
Smart Referer, to sanitize referer information
Skip Redirect, to skip intermediary pages
True Sight, reveals CDN usage of web pages
Behave!, monitors pages for suspicious mischief
Additional extensions:
KeePassXC-Browser, (autofill passwords from KeePassXC, to keep them off the system clipboard.)
Pinboard WebExtension, cuz I love me my bookmarks
SimpleLogin:Receive & Send emails anonymously
Regarding arkenfox user.js:
The arkenfox user.js is a template which aims to provide as much privacy and enhanced security as possible, and to reduce tracking and fingerprinting as much as possible - while minimizing any loss of functionality and breakage (but it will happen).
LibRedirect or Privacy Redirect, to automatically re-route links from privacy-invasive sites to more privacy-friendly, less resource-sucking sites, i.e. invidious instead of youtube, nitter instead of twitter, teddit instead of reddit.
Font Contrast to help make sites readable by humans, used in conjunction with Firefox’s Font controls.* (NoSquint isn’t working too well these days, so I can’t recommend it.)
*TIP: In FF settings, uncheck “Allow pages to choose their own fonts” and change the default DejaVu fonts to something else if you want to make sure you never again see that wispy, faint, spider-web-thin font that many sites seem to think is so cool, aka DejaVu Sans ExtraLight.
Oh, and Custom Scrollbars in conjunction with a little CSS magic.
My curiosity: being L5 built with focus on privacy and security, all those mentioned extensions should be not necessary using default browser, right?
It’s like purism browser already has inside itself all privacy and security extractions
The built-in Librem 5 browser does have some baked-in features like adblock and some tracking protection, but it is not as advanced a browser as Firefox, and so if you are really concerned with privacy and security, then I would recommend using something like Tor or Firefox with the Arkenfox tweaks mentioned above.
It aims to strike a balance between simplicity and usability for an average user and the privacy/security generally expected from the open source community.
Latest version of upstream epiphany has initial support for extensions. So it will be still take some time but extension support is in the upstream developers roadmap.
