Or a fork of Firefox like fennec
- ublock origin, first last and if necessary only extension you really need
- dark reader
- youtube shorts block - converts shorts links into regular video player with actual fucking seek/volume controls
- youtube sponsor block - I pay for my bandwidth, I decide what gets downloaded.
- privacy badger
You don’t need privacy badger anymore if you have ublock
Huh, I didn’t realize. I’ve had it installed forever, I guess I didn’t realize. Oh well, I just switched back to Brave and I don’t even have uBO installed anymore and it’s been fine.
Doesn’t Firefox have reader mode with dark mode built in? Don’t get me wrong, I find that functionality indispensable, but I didn’t think it required a plugin.
Maybe? shrug I didn’t look too hard, I stumbled across someone talking about dark reader and was like ‘I must have this in my life.’
Youtube Unhook lets you disable specific parts of the website: Shorts, Recommendations, Comments, and lets you redirect from startpage to subscriptions like in the olden days.
Bring back the dislike button or something like that for YT.
Shorts are the only thing that really annoyed me, I don’t mind recommendations or comments, and I just keep a tab open on my subs page all the time anyway.
i’m turd burglar and i approve this message
uBlock Origin
Sponsorblock
Multi account containers
Password manager like Bitwarden
Bypass Paywalls Clean
Do not use cloud password managers. If you can, self host your bitwarden instance.
My suggestion is KeePass (XC on PC and DX on mobile) with syncthing. It’s very flexible and useful for stuff beyond passwords, like ids, notes, emails etc
uBlock Origin Firefox Multi-Account Contaniners (and then use them) If you use some kind of webmail like google, hotmail, yahoo, then: Webmail Ad Blocker Remove FBclid and UTM
Optional Dark Reader Enhancer for Youtube
uBlock Origin and nothing else. The more extensions, the more unique you’re fingerprint will be and the bigger your attack surface.
CanvasBlocker works well for that.
I’m not gonna lie, I’m a little bit of an extensions hoarder, which is bad for fingerprinting 😣, but I seriously do use the extra ones.
Vital:
uBlock - obviously, some people even suggest to only use this extension and nothing else to reduce fingerprinting. Make sure to enable those filters! Also check out the advanced mode, eliminates the need for NoScript.
Not Vital But Really Good To Have:
LibRedirect - Never worry again about visiting the original social media site, you can immediately be redirected to a proxy version of the site that doesn’t stalk you. Great when I’m forced to click a Twitter, Reddit, Youtube, etc. link. Unfortunately, some proxy services are dead (Instagram, Tiktok, Invidious is always under threat, etc.)
Bitwarden - Password manager
Dark Reader - Nice, especially on fingerprint resisting browsers like Librewolf that don’t let your browser/sites see your system settings to automatically pick the dark mode of a website. Have singed my eyes a couple times.
For Language Learners (like me):
Yomitan - The GOAT of tools, a popup dictionary that can be used to instantly look up the definition of a word in your target language, and connects with Anki, a flashcard app. I use it for making vocabulary cards from Japanese media I consume. Literally all the other resources are meant to be paired with this.
Asbplayer - Lets you add subtitles to whatever media you’re streaming and makes the text selectable. Paired with Yomitan, you can easily make Anki flashcards from the TV/Movies/Videos you watch.
Lap Clipboard Inserter - By using a clipboard extension with Textractor, you can hook a game/visual novel and auto-copy all the game text to a webpage, which can be paired with Yomitan (you guessed it!) to look up words. You have to turn it on for individual pages, so don’t worry about it constantly stalking you.
Neat, But Random:
Mastodon Streetpass - Helps you figure out if a person is on Mastodon by looking for a custom link on their site. Collects a list of them and tells you the date that it found the account. Basically just browse as usual and it will passively collect a list.
A fellow Japanese learner and VN enjoyer! Are you on Linux? I ran into issues with Lap Clipboard Inserter not capturing any clipboard events when the window was in the background, and I think it’s an issue with Wayland, since all firefox-based browsers had the same issue but chromium-based ones didn’t
Yep, I used Fedora Kinoite now! I originally used Fedora Silverblue, but that used GNOME + Wayland, and I dropped it cause spectacle couldn’t take screenshots in a Wayland based system. I switched to Kinoite because it uses Plasma instead. I don’t know if Wayland causes clipboard issues, as I never tested/got that far when trying to make Silverblue work. I just rebased cause I couldn’t get ShareX (the tool I used while on Windows) to work with WINE.
I use my clipboard tool with FF and have little to no issues there. The only thing I will note is, Textractor hooks the sentences a little weirdly. None of the hooks are perfect, the best one I can find that isn’t complete gibberish is a hook that simply copies the sentence twice. All the others repeat characters in a sentence like 50 times, so they’re unsalvageable. Not sure if it’s a browser hook thing, or a trying to force Windows apps in weird ways thing, but it’s not as smooth as a process compared to native Windows 😅
At least from my research, Kinoite is Wayland. I think you can go to KDE (Plasma) settings, find the “About this System” page and it should say “Graphics Platform: Wayland”. GNOME and KDE are desktop environments, X11 and Wayland are display managers (I think of them like rendering engines).Though it’s true that Spectacle has issues on Wayland, apparently all screenshot apps do, due to security restrictions and slow development. But Spectacle works great on KDE because Spectacle is made by KDE, and gets special privileges when run on KDE desktop. Same with GNOME screenshot when run on GNOME desktop. Third-party screenshot tools don’t get these privileges and don’t work well on either (at least when using Wayland), you can read more about it here: https://github.com/ksnip/ksnip/issues/727.
As far as Textractor goes, I haven’t had any issues with text hooking, but from my experience it heavily depends on the game, and I’ve only tested 2 games on linux so far. But if I’m reading you correctly…are you using Firefox inside WINE?
I’m partial to this one
Category “how the hell isn’t this included by default” :
- Copy Plain Text: Adds an option in the right click menu to copy the selected text as plain text, without formatting
- Copy Link Text : Adds an option in the right click menu to copy the text of a link
- Markdown Reader: Show formatted markdown. I tried several extensions for this and this is the one I prefer personally. It has an index panel on the left which is sooo useful.
Category “Preserving your mental health online” :
- uBlock Origin: You really need to block those ads
- Consent-O-Matic: Never see a cookie pop-up again in your life (it auto accepts or refuse in your place).
- SponsorBlock: Skips Youtube sponsorships. You can define which ones you want to skip and which you want to watch (paid ads, self promo, etc)
- Return Youtube Dislike: Show the number of dislikes on videos. It’s not a real number, it’s extrapolated based on how many people with the app have clicked dislike.
- Youtube No Translate: Keeps titles, descriptions and audio tracks in their original language
Category “Usefull” :
- KeePassXC-Browser: To access your password database from your browser
- Whatever fingerprinting protection you can find (Canvas, Fonts, WebGL, etc… half those I used have been pulled, haven’t found a replacement for all of them)
Category “Would be nice if…” :
- A user agent switcher… if you want all websites to block you 😑
- NoScript: Block javascript and create custom rules to allow it only when and where you want. Or the reverse. It was great a few years ago but I’ve stopped using it because websites require allowing more and more otherwise nothing works and it’s hell can we cancel javascript please?
- Dark Reader: Dark mode for all websites. Can make some websites unreadable, but you can turn it off for that website. Makes everything much slower though so I don’t use it.
BTW for plain text, ctrl+shift+V pastes as plain text.
For copying link text if you hold alt and drag you can select text without activating the link, then ctrl+C as usual.
I had no idea about the second one! I still like having a context menu option, right click + E seems much less of a hassle than selecting the text and copying, but it’s nice to know you can select part of a link! How did I never notice that you could in 20 years? 😅
Yeah alt+select doesn’t work 100% of the time too so the extension sounds nice lol
Pro-tip: you may not need Consent-O-Matic. There are uBlock Origin cookie banner filters that you can enable (even though they break some websites, even if it’s rare)
Thanks, that’s nice to know!
But Consent-O-Matic does not break websites (very rarely so), so it’s better than uBlock in that specific area.
- ublock origin
- dark reader
- firenvim
- vimium
- containers
For android mobile I use Ironfox.
https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox
Its a fork of the now discontinued Mull browser.
I’ve tried it a few times but tend to fall back to Fennec. While Librewolf on desktop is restrictive by design, it also still allows you tweak the settings to your liking (with some scolding). Ironfox felt much more locked down to me, and if a site was completely broken, I couldn’t do anything about it in the settings.
Huh? You can totally change the advanced settings (about:config) for Ironfox. I literally had to do that a few months ago to get a certain feature working for an extension I use cause some javascript and SCP settings were disabled for privacy/security.
Now, I completely understand why you wouldn’t want to spend hours tweaking settings and reading Mozilla’s source code forms to get stuff to work, so if that’s the reason for switching then I get it. But you can absolutely change the config settings, unlike vanilla Android Firefox which doesn’t enable about:config
I went on the same path. I was surprised how many sites were broken in IronFox.
I know the mobile browser space is just weird overall, especially Firefox forks, but it definitely stood out to me. Things that work totally fine in Librewolf out-of-the-box were totally busted, and most settings are inaccessible.
I’m still keeping an eye on it though, as Fennec leaves a lot to be desired, and using a chromium-based browser like Vanadium won’t do it for me because I rely so much on the cross-platform sync functions.
also to add Iron fox is slow as hell. I personally use cromite.
Ohhh, I loved Mull. Good to hear someone forked it.
- uBlock Origin
- NoScript
- JShelter
- CSS Exfil Protection
- Libredirect
- Indie Wiki Buddy
I also sometimes use the IceCat extensions, too:
- LibreJS
- LibrifyJS
- Reveal hidden HTML
- Searxes’ Third-party Request blocker
- Workarounds for nonfree JS
Jshelter is good. You know it works because many shady websites won’t even load bx they are big bad they can’t finger print you lol
i fkin love noscript it pairs well with ublock origin
I don’t think NoScript is a good idea in 2025. It breaks virtually all websites.
uBlock Origin + cookie banner filters should be enough
NoScript breaks every site and does little good.
breaking websites is a good thing actually, as it disables any and all javascript and webgl tracking (and you can unbreak a website anyway if you really need javascript for it to function)
It’s more that I have to re-enable scripts on most websites, so it’s not giving me much benefit.
What advantage does it have compared to extended mode of ublock? I used NoScript years ago but switched to ublock to block scripts and resources.
ublock origin, nutensor(umatrix), twp, bypass paywalls clean, dark reader, vimfx
Surprised no one posted this link: https://awesome-privacy.xyz/security-tools/browser-extensions
Great resource btw, check out the website for other tools.
ublock origin and umatrix, anything else only makes you more fingerprintable
ublock origin, dark background and light text
