Ask HN: What extension/plugin is now ubiquitous to your web browsing?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26570722

by user0x1d • 5 years ago

6 7 5 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Just today I tried a friend’s computer and missed uBlock Origin and saw tons of ads; I also saw what youtube is like without the extension to remove whatever you want from the page (I only allow the search bar, not to get distracted by anything)

zzo38computer• 5 years ago

In addition to disabling JavaScripts (which also removes nearly all ads), probably the "relative location bar", and the changes I made to the download dialog box (it now displays the actual URL and MIME type, and adds a "view source" option, in case it is a plain text file that the browser nevertheless wants to force downloading). These features are added using userChrome.js, and I find it useful. But what I have enabled a lot (including on HN) is user CSS. Sometimes simply disabling CSS works, but sometimes it works better to add my own additional CSS codes. (For example, on HN, I have it set up to display all comments in black, and to display vertical lines to the left of comments so that the indentation level can easily be seen. If I could make it sort everything chronologically across pages, I would have that too, but it doesn't do that.)

superasn• 5 years ago

I'd say lastpass but hoping to switch to Bitwarden soon. also i don't care about cookies, small plugin but really makes the web more bearable.

syncbehind• 5 years ago

Absolutely switch to Bitwarden. Self-hosting is ezpz too.

Jugurtha• 5 years ago

- Dark Reader: It will make you unimpressed by the news of a website adding a dark theme, as everything will be displayed in a dark theme, which you can tweak, by default. You can also choose that certain websites be displayed with their original stylesheet.

- Video Speed Controller: control the speed of videos on many websites. You can speed up to 16x and down to 0.07x. Speeding up to 16x is useless for talks that don't link to their slides but show them on the video. You speed up an hour long video and see just the slides in about 4 minutes. If you deem there's enough density or that the treatment is adequate, you can invest in watching the whole thing.

- YouTube Captions Search: "It's like 'ctrl + f' (or 'cmd + f'), but for YouTube". search on a YouTube video's captions. It's useful in many ways. One way is when you have already watched a video and liked a segment addressing a topic. You can go to the video, click on the icon, type in a word from that segment, and it will display the occurrences of that word with their timestamps and context/sentence they're in. You then click on the one you want to go to and it'll take you to the timestamp. One other way is if you want to know if a video addresses a certain topic, but the video's title or description do not mention it: you type in the keywords, and you'll find out.

- Just Read: it is amazing. If you read a lot of content and pages on the internet, Just Read is akin to an IDE's "Zen Mode" or "Distraction free mode. Ctrl + Shift + L and it'll take the page, change its layout only to the main article, removing stuff on the side, ads, all the superfluous. It is appeasing and you only notice how noisy pages are when you use that. You can configure the font and font-size / css to apply to the page. I've set a large font and it looks like a reader.

Recent ones: "High Resolution Downloader for Instagram". I can't stand Instagram's tiny image sizes. This makes it possible to click on a photo and have two buttons appear, one to download, the other to open in a new tab with the real size.

These are in addition to the usual extensions to keep one's sanity on the world wild web.

ramitmittal• 5 years ago

HTTPS Everywhere

Sorted - for managing bookmarks (move bookmarks into folders)

Quick Copy - for managing clipboard (shortcuts, persistent storage, management)

I wrote the last two

phekunde• 5 years ago

I use this to avoid distraction: https://switchoff.neocities.org

Sodaware• 5 years ago

Privacy Badger: blocks a bunch of trackers - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/privacy-badge...

Privacy Possum: blocks additional trackers that Privacy Badger sometimes misses - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/privacy-possu...

Stylus: Let's me adjust the CSS of any website. I use this to tweak websites that have poor contrast or text that's too big/too small - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/

Ask HN: What extension/plugin is now ubiquitous to your web browsing?

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