The Portable Freeware Collection Forums

I use both Chrome and Firefox. Most time I open Chrome. And thanks for the information.

About time for a report on essential addons for the privacy concerned Mozilla user -- and a much needed workaround...

• Self-Destructing Cookies (SDC, http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox ... g-cookies/)

  Fix the web. Gets rid of a site's cookies and LocalStorage as soon as you close its tabs. Protects against trackers and zombie-cookies. Trustworthy services can be whitelisted.

• I don't care about cookies (IDCAC, http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox ... t-cookies/)

  Get rid of annoying cookie warnings from thousands of 'infected' websites!

• Privacy Badger (http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox ... r-firefox/)

  Protects your privacy by blocking spying ads and invisible trackers. Warning: This add-on is in alpha, so you may find some bugs! Read more: http://www.eff.org/privacybadger

The first is a boon for your peace of mind, taking care of every unwanted tracker that gets tossed in your online path. The default "Grace period" is just 10 seconds before they get eradicated, but I usually set it to a more magnanimous 60. After that, and unless a saving click on SDC interface icon precludes it, it's bye-bye (and if you uncheck "Notifications" in SDC settings, you won't even notice them).

Of course the next time you go knocking on some website door bearing no cookies, you're bound to have to click on the deterrent cookie policy agreement. After a while it gets on your nerves, so enter IDCAC to wash away the pests.

But cookies aren't the only tracking devices lurking in today's fraught onlinescapes. Far more devious ways are being devised daily, some of them on pretty arcane foundations (ever heard of "canvas fingerprinting", for instance? Head this way if you haven't: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_fingerprinting). The EFF comes to your rescue with the Badger. It might not be perfect, but then again, who is?

One of the unwanted annoyances of this arsenal is that visiting some sites can get pretty galling: Sourceforge.net is an example. Despite all the counter-measures above, every single visit to SF.net you have to acknowledge its Trust-e.com curated cookie policy, which is even more distressing since it resides on Trust-e 3rd party servers, which break no records for their swiftness.

Well, that ends now. Before any of the above addons, the single-most first one every Mozillian has to install is Adblock (https://adblockplus.org/), right?

Once again, ABP comes to the rescue here: open "Filter preferences", and go to the "Custom filters" tab; under "Adblocking rules" add this new rule ("Add filter"): And under "Element hiding rules" add the following:
Cheers!

Midas wrote:... Before any of the above addons, the single-most first one every Mozillian has to install is Adblock (https://adblockplus.org/), right?

Right

... and thanks for the other ones, very useful

I find Adblock Edge much more effective.

Click for video intro in German.

joby_toss wrote:I find Adblock Edge much more effective.

Click for video intro in German.

Isn't the only difference between Plus and Edge that Edge commented out the code that allowed for the option of allowing some ads? Certainly was the only difference at the start and I made my feelings known about the authors laziness back then.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... ws/391358/

carbonize wrote:Isn't the only difference between Plus and Edge that Edge commented out the code that allowed for the option of allowing some ads? Certainly was the only difference at the start and I made my feelings known about the authors laziness back then.

People exaggerate when they say it's so much better than ABP. Apparently not needing to toggle a single option is a massive improvement /s. People would rather go through the trouble of whining online about it and spend wasted time installing a whole different addon when a it takes 2 seconds to disable it. I prefer to stick with the official ABP and use the dev builds with Fanboy's Ultimate List to be on the bleeding edge of blocking annoyances. In other words, the fork is unnecessary IMO.

Anyway, here's some neat image viewing related addons:
Imagus: http://tiny.cc/Imagus or https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/imagus/
Viewhance: http://tiny.cc/Viewhance

Userfriendly wrote: Imagus: http://tiny.cc/Imagus or https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/imagus/

Whoa. I had no idea Imagus had been ported to browsers other than Opera.

I use a lot of the plugins already mentioned and these also:
Auto-sort Bookmarks
Fire IE (switches between IE and FF tabs, very customizable)
HTTPS-Everywhere (from the EFF - Electronic Frontier Foundation)
Privacy Badger (also from EFF)
Speed Dial [FVD] (highly customizable speed dials)
Click&Clean

In regard of images:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... zoom-plus/
or
Greasemonkey + https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/404-m ... age-viewer
I also wondering, what's more memory-friendly, addons or userscripts?

Edit: crap, I forgot this was an old thread and I'd already responded. Oh well.

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billon wrote:what's more memory-friendly, addons or userscripts?

I strongly suspect userscripts because they probably see more scrutiny than add-ons and therefore probably have seen more optimizations, but I haven't tested this.

My add-on list:

• pdfViewerSwitcher (swap between Adobe and Firefox viewers; works great)
• BetterPrivacy - mostly for the options to kill Flash cookies and other garbage
• HTTPS Everywhere - always pushes the browser to use secure connections
• Multifox and Multifox Toolbar Button (love this so much; once I found it was hard to use a browser without it)

I have a few other tools that I use on my other machine ... I'll update this post once I get that list.

Anyone else finding that Firefox is a bit sluggish these days and nowhere near as fluid as it used to be?

carbonize wrote:Anyone else finding that Firefox is a bit sluggish these days and nowhere near as fluid as it used to be?

About a year ago I was really stumbling over Firefox as it just seemed to hesitate at every opportunity but that's mostly cleared up. Additionally, the plugins/add-ons we're talking about can sometimes slow down Firefox. Try running it in "safe" mode or pull down a new portable version and see if you're still getting that. You can run it alongside your existing installation with two methods:

http://www.portablefreeware.com/forums/ ... =2&t=15857 (portable)
http://www.portablefreeware.com/forums/ ... hp?p=26315 (not portable)

Eh, Firefox gets faster with each new version at least that's my perception and what benchmarks show. Go try out the old 2.x or 3.x versions before the rapid release builds came out. Massive difference. Especially if you have tons of addons and thousands of bookmarks. I mean even the changelogs show some kind of performance improvement one way or another for each update.

Here's a list of problematic addons (could be outdated) http://kb.mozillazine.org/Problematic_extensions

As for plugins most people should probably only have flash. But could also have unity, shockwave, and silverlight. If you have java installed, the browser plugin for that should be disabled by default. In my experience, flash can be the major cause of slowdowns depending on how a website uses it. To be safe, you can set plugins to be "Ask to activate" so you can manually whitelist per site and you don't get surprise crashes and slowdowns when you open a webpage. Alternatively, use noscript.

Here's the sourceforge page for all the portable builds of firefox If you wanna do some scientific testing http://sourceforge.net/projects/portabl ... table%20Ed./

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

GHacks recently reviewed uBlock for FF, a popular ad/script blocker for Chrome. Although still in the development stage, a test version for FF can be downloaded here. Scroll down the page and and look for uBlock.xpi to install it. Been testing it for about a week so far. It's easy to setup and use, and it seems to be effective.