Best Firefox add-ons [was "plugin(s)"]

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romulous
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Re: Best Firefox plugin(s)

#31 Post by romulous »

carbonize wrote:We're not talking benchmarks we're talking about the basics. Sometimes it becomes unresponsive and I have to wait. Hopefully E10 will go someway to rectifying this issue
If you mean when you go to click a tab, it does not become active and Firefox itself seems to stop responding - but about 5 to 10 seconds later, it then begins to respond again (eg you click the tab and it finally pops into view), I had that. For what it is worth, on my system at least, disabling hardware acceleration in Firefox itself seems to have fixed it. I did find reports that ESET is a known cause of this as well (which I run on my system) - but rather than disabling the relevant parts of that, I tried hardware acceleration first, and thankfully that did seem to work.

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Userfriendly
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Re: Best Firefox plugin(s)

#32 Post by Userfriendly »

Hardware acceleration is most likely the answer for hangs/freezes. Certain gpu's and drivers causes it but nobody know which and why. Doesn't happen to everybody. If you google search each and every driver version, someone is bound to have a problem with it and others will be fine. Works for me but not for you. Coupled with other variables that can mess with browsers such as antivirus, firewalls, plugins, unstable overclocks, faulty ram, etc. Go figure why its hard to fix.

To somewhat stay on topic and be relevant to firefox slowness...

See how much memory each addon installed takes up.
about:addons-memory - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... ns-memory/

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webfork
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Re: Best Firefox plugin(s)

#33 Post by webfork »

romulous wrote:If you mean when you go to click a tab, it does not become active and Firefox itself seems to stop responding - but about 5 to 10 seconds later, it then begins to respond again ... disabling hardware acceleration in Firefox itself seems to have fixed it.
Here's how to do that: http://lifehacker.com/disable-firefoxs- ... -749344037 ... (I've seen this happen a few times on my machine so I'm testing it now.)

Additionally, I've sped up Firefox quite a bit by just disabling Flash, but you can also use something like Flashblock or Flashdisable to cut down on the annoyance associated with that:

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webfork
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Re: Best Firefox plugin(s)

#34 Post by webfork »

Old thread update ... a while back Ghacks highlighted some great extensions I hadn't heard about .... http://www.ghacks.net/2015/02/09/these- ... ox-unique/ ... which reminded me to go over some add-ons I only use up at work:

Usability
  • GreaseMonkey with auto-login (use this up at work to help speed up the process of jumping into SO many login structures on our intranet)
  • DownThemAll - great for scraping a webpage for all it's resources, again important on our intranet which has a bunch of annoying, internally-developed scripts that interfering with basic browser usage.
  • Saved Password editor - we changes passwords frequently up here and I have saved passwords for 20+ domains so this makes batch editing passwords a breeze.
  • MultiFox - this one is critical both for privacy and for web development.  It lets me log into the same service twice with two different credentials.

Interface
  • Imagus - this one is annoying because everytime you hover over an image, it tries to show you the full-size version, but I've found I much prefer it.  Fortunately in the options you can disable/enable it by holding ctrl, shift, alt, or the right button.  I've set it to "enabled" when holding down shift.  There are loads of other great features.
  • pdfViewerSwitcher - because I use PDFs a lot up at work and Mozilla's viewer sometimes works better than Adobe, sometimes not.
Security
  • BetterPrivacy - mostly because of the Adobe Flash cookies.  I've set this to delete cookies every 10 minutes.
  • HTTPS-Everywhere - definitely want my work machine going to secure websites whenever possible.
My Theme: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... e-stylish/

Any suggestions?

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Userfriendly
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Re: Best Firefox plugin(s)

#35 Post by Userfriendly »

Good password addons to go with Saved Password Editor:
QuickPasswords - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... passwords/
SecureLogin - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... ure-login/

If you got login cookies you want to protect from deletion or maybe just want to edit their expiration dates. Can also just be a plain and simple cookie editor:
CookieKeeper - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... kiekeeper/

Something related to cookies is a file called SiteSecurityServiceState.txt which stores HSTS Super Cookies. Cookie keeper will support deletion on exit in future version https://bugs.launchpad.net/cookiekeeper/+bug/1407443. If you're super paranoid you can delete the contents and set it as read only.
more info: http://radicalresearch.co.uk/lab/hstssupercookies

I like this addon to check filesizes or modified dates of download links to see if maybe file is newer and updated.
Link Properties Plus - https://github.com/Infocatcher/Link_Properties_Plus

Some extra usability for url bar by linkifying each section of the url making it easy to jump through subdomains:
Locationbar³ - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... bar%C2%B3/
Userstyles to modify its appearance:
https://userstyles.org/styles/1842/fire ... 2-css-mods
https://userstyles.org/styles/59884/fir ... -by-jerone
https://userstyles.org/styles/15742/loc ... ver-effect

Stitch together pages kinda like Autopager except you do it manually:
Re-Pagination - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... agination/

Keep bookmark menu open after opening a bookmark to help facilitate opening multiple bookmarks without constantly having to re-open the menus or using bookmarks sidebar. Also supports keeping certain other menus open. The beta version is restartless.
Stay-Open Menu - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... open-menu/

Double click to open plain text links:
Text Link - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... text-link/

Searched for a bookmark in your bookmarks library but it doesn't show which parent folder it's nested in. Problem solved with these addons:
Show Parent Folder - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... nt-folder/
Go Parent Folder - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... nt-folder/
Addon author also has a bunch of bugfix addons for buggy Firefox GUI related stuff - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... alice0775/

Only bookmark sort addon I've found that let's me sort by URL and not just name.
sort-by-name-tweak - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... ame-tweak/

For advanced Firefox users, this pair of addons helps me customize Firefox and websites with Stylish. Helps with finding css selector ID's.
DOM Inspector - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... ctor-6622/
Element Inspector - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... inspector/

Adblock Plus alternative uBlock recently was handed over to another dev but it seems like the former main branch/fork continues to be developed. Some changes between forks could be merged. Can be installed side by side if wanted to see differences.
Original uBlock₀ - https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
New uBlock - https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock

My favorite dark theme:
NASA Night Launch - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... ht-launch/

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joby_toss
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Re: Best Firefox plugin(s)

#36 Post by joby_toss »

Context Search X (saves me a lot of clicks; custom engines can be created here and here)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefo ... -search-x/

Image Zoom (I use it mainly to set a maximum default zoom for images, so that they don't exceed the width of my screen, but it is much more capable)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefo ... mage-zoom/

Metal Lion Australis Graphite (favorite dark theme; clever coding allows it not to break easily when FF version changes)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefo ... -graphite/

Image

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Midas
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Re: Best Firefox plugin(s)

#37 Post by Midas »

Not really a Firefox plugin, but marginally related...

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webfork
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Re: Best Firefox plugin(s)

#38 Post by webfork »

Glad I asked about this ... quickly found some good plugins ...
Userfriendly wrote:Location bar

Great idea.  Added and really enjoying this.
Joby wrote:Image Zoom
Looks good, thanks.

Edit: Just found another one I'll definitely be using here on the site: Find and Replace for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... r-firefox/

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Userfriendly
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Re: Best Firefox plugin(s)

#39 Post by Userfriendly »

Found a fork of Locationbar² while searching for an addon to decode urls. XPI download is broken so just download ZIP and make an XPI out of the contents.
Locationbar²-utf8 https://github.com/titoBouzout/locationbar2-utf8
Description:
This is a hacked version to support UTF8 URLs without breaking URLs.

Motivation:
From the very first version this add-on breaks UTF8 characters in the location bar, specially with parameters. As I already fixed this many times, today I start this parallel project, hoping to get the fixes on the original version.

Provides the following fixes and features:
- It shows everything decoded, (more than original version).
- When selecting, it show real URL ( allows editing of parameters without breaking URL)
- Breadcrumbs works everywhere.
- Tooltip shows decoded.
- Provides two button to decode/encode the selected text in the location bar.
Stylish Editor Mod (need original installed too)- https://github.com/srazzano/Stylish_Mod
CodeMirror Themes (to use in conjunction with mod) - https://userstyles.org/styles/111876/codemirror-themes
Forum Thread - https://forum.userstyles.org/discussion ... editor-mod

Also a ghacks post to explain some of the drama surrounding uBlock (read comments for more info). http://www.ghacks.net/2015/04/25/offici ... r-firefox/

However drama between the two devs seems to have been sorted out https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/130

Which version to keep using? No Idea. Probably the original - uBlock Origin. Stick with ABP if you don't care about higher memory usage. Other than that, there's no other perceptible difference in performance between ABP and uBlock on my system. ABP may have better filter list compatibility since most are designed to work with it. *I've noticed uBlock not neatly collapsing some blocked elements while ABP does it properly.*FIXED

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Midas
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Re: Best Firefox plugin(s)

#40 Post by Midas »

Previously mentioned EFF's Privacy Badger has reached v1.0 (no changelog, release history is at http://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerfirefox/releases); download from:

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webfork
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Re: Best Firefox plugin(s)

#41 Post by webfork »

Those of you that may be annoyed by some of Firefox's new features can disable all of them with one plugin:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... et-reader/

Why disable these things? Ghacks has had a number of articles on all 3 but I'll try to summarize based on my understanding:

* Pocket is a 3rd party service that Mozilla went with after an open source version of this same tool didn't take off. As I understand it, the program works a bit like Evernote in archving articles you care about.
* Hello/WebRTC is amazing but as it enables direct IP connections, it may carry a privacy issue.
* Reader - I have no idea.

You can re-enable one or all of these inside the options.

----

Edit: I tested Pocket on iOS and was not impressed; it doesn't work with iOS Firefox, the "following" option is junk, and it leans hard on social networking. How an application this widely used lacks a simple search tool to find other users is beyond me. Maybe the iOS client is just way behind other platforms.

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Midas
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Re: Best Firefox plugin(s)

#42 Post by Midas »

Cool. 8)

If you're in a hurry, here are the keys you need to set to 'false' in "about:config" to disable these Firefox enhancements (you might even gain some free memory):
  • Code: Select all

    browser.pocket.enabled
    media.peerconnection.enabled
    reader.parse-on-load.enabled

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webfork
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Re: Best Firefox plugin(s)

#43 Post by webfork »

Midas wrote:here are the keys you need to set to 'false' in "about:config" to disable these Firefox enhancements
Good to know, thanks. I definitely don't mind the extra effort.

carbonize
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Re: Best Firefox plugin(s)

#44 Post by carbonize »

Midas wrote:Previously mentioned EFF's Privacy Badger has reached v1.0 (no changelog, release history is at http://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerfirefox/releases); download from:
Thought I'd give this a go instead of ABP for a while. I find it's interface slow and it doesn't remove the placeholder for blocked ads so you end up with whitespace where the ads were. You also still see ads since it only blocks ads that track you.

I do remember seeing on the Firefox release tracker that an upcoming version had some code that speeded up ABP but the next time I looked that particular entry had been removed.

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webfork
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Re: Best Firefox plugin(s)

#45 Post by webfork »

carbonize wrote:Thought I'd give this a go instead of ABP for a while. I find it's interface slow and it doesn't remove the placeholder for blocked ads so you end up with whitespace where the ads were.
I've used it in concert with Adblock Plus so I haven't seen the placeholder element issue that you mention. I'll start using it without ABP.

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