11 Interesting Firefox Add-ons to Improve Your Browsing Experience – It’s FOSS

I think we can all agree that Firefox is one of the best browsers for Linux.

And, as a cherry on top, you can enhance your browsing experience with some extensions! Maybe even isolate Facebook?

Before I suggest some awesome Firefox add-ons, let me give you some pointers.

One thing that we all know is that blindly installing browser extensions can be extremely harmful. So how do you determine if a browser extension is safe to use?

Since this article is about Firefox add-ons, we focus on Firefoxs marketplace (the official place to get the add-ons).

While nothing is 100% bug-free/secure, there are a few things one can check:

With that said, let us take a look at a few of the extensions that improves your web browsing experience.

Also Read: 9 Open Source Add-Ons to Improve Your Mozilla Firefox Experience

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Everyone hates Facebook, but rarely anyone is willing to remove Facebooks tracking elements from their own website. So Mozilla pulled a Thanos moment Fine. Ill do it myself and created this add-on for Firefox users.

As the name suggests, an isolated container (not related to Docker) is created for Facebook. All the Facebook-related stuff happens inside this isolated container. This ends up making it harder for the social media giant to track you.

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uBlock Origin is one of the most well-known and trusted ad blocking add-ons for Firefox. Yes, it is primarily used for blocking ads, but because its basic task is to block elements in your web browser, it can block a lot of items. Advertisements, yes, but also web trackers, cryptocurrency miners, pop-ups, etc.

Though its permissions may seem a bit excessive, there is a reason behind it. The add-on needs permissions like Access browser activity during navigation and Access your data for all websites so that it can assess every query and block ones that seem harmful or useless.

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Bitwarden should be the go-to password manager for everyone. It has free sync support for mobile, web (browser), and desktop, can also store notes securely, helps generate usernames and passwords, auto-fills user info, and much more. On top of that, it is made available under the GPL-3.0 License. Who doesnt love free and open source software?

Bitwarden has everything that I would look for in a password manager. It costs just $10, if you want to upgrade to its premium plan and not self-host it. I highly recommend its Firefox add-on!

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Are you someone who wants an open-source alternative to Grammarly? While I dont have any issues using Grammarly, something that I really like and prefer is free and open-source software. LanguageTool is an excellent tool one can use for checking grammar inconsistencies like spelling errors, using a different spelling (color vs colour), commonly confused words (then vs than) and you also get a thesaurus with it.

In my experience of using this add-on, it has worked reliably on almost all text fields. No issues there. The two biggest features of this add-on are as follows:

Picture this, you are reading an article on the Internet. There are two banner ads on the top and bottom of the webpage. There are ads on the whole right side. On top of the bottom ad banner is a video playing automatically. You turn on the ad blocker. But the video continues to play. The banners dont have ads in them, but they still use up valuable screen real estate. Bothered much?

Dont be too bothered. Behold, the Tranquility Reader add-on for Firefox. This extension removes extra elements like photos, videos, ads, social media share buttons, etc. It gives you a clean UI with nothing but text, so you can focus on reading.

The Tranquility Reader add-on has the following stats:

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Enhancer for Youtube add-on for Firefox is one of its kind. It adds a few buttons to the YouTube player, allowing for greater customization. You get things like changing the resolution, controlling playback speed, controlling audio volume level with the mouse scroll wheel, and much, much more.

You can find more information about the extension on its official webpage.

Keeping a track of your time, productivity and sanity is crucial when you are browsing the internet. Especially when you are researching a topic and go down a rabbit hole. You deserve a break, but you will be so entrenched that you may lose track of time.

The Tomato Clock add-on is exactly what its name suggests. It is a clock timer. A tomato is 25 minutes long, which feels either long or short depending on your mental engagement with the content displayed on the screen. Upon completion of 25 minutes, you will get a browser notification, notifying you about the ever-passing of time.

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When you search for the term Red Lamborghini, you get images of a red-colored Lamborghini. But, what if you didnt know what car it was? This add-on allows you to search for images, using the imageinstead of textual termsand shows similar results or the source of origin for that image.

You have the following ways of choosing an image for a search:

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Having an accessible dictionary is never a bad thing! Ive certainly been spoilt by the force touch to look-up feature of macOS. The Dictionary Anywhere add-on for Firefox really makes up for it when I am on my desktop, using Linux. All I need to do to get a words definition is to double-click on the word, and the definition pops up!

For the moment, the only supported languages are English, Spanish, German and French. Please note that this extension will NOT work with Firefoxs reader mode. That is because scripts are not allowed to be executed in this mode.

A slight downside is that this makes it slightly annoying to double click and select a whole word in an editable text field. A small price to pay for salvation.

Also, if you want an actively maintained extension, this will disappoint you.

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If you are a Vim user, do I really need to explain this to you? Go try it for yourself! Youll thank me later.

For those who dont know what this add-on does, it allows you to navigate around Firefox solely using the Vim-style keys. Pressing the J key scrolls down, pressing the K key scrolls up, pressing the X key closes the current tab, pressing the T key opens a new tab, and a variety of other keyboard shortcuts.

While this add-on has the Experimental badge, I have had no problems with it in my experience of using it over the last year or two.

FireShot is a very simple Firefox add-on. It allows you to capture the full web pages into a single, long image or as a PDF file. On top of that, you can annotate too (hahaha)! Although annotation only works on Windows, thats a bummer!

It does not have a Recommended badge by Firefox. So, you can explore more about it on its add-on page before you decide to use it.

This article covers a wide range of add-ons for Firefox that I think should help improve your web browsing experience.

What is your favorite Firefox extension? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

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11 Interesting Firefox Add-ons to Improve Your Browsing Experience - It's FOSS