This is a post about my current Firefox configuration and usage. This was mainly motivated by me noticing the Containers feature and the change into Firefox Quantum which prompted some chances in my usual extensions.
Containers
Containers is a neat feature that lets me separate different accounts, e.g. I can be logged on to my personal Gmail and our club’s Gmail at the same time without using different browsers or private windows. On my Fedora laptop this seems to be baked into Firefox but at my Windows-running work laptop I had to install the Firefox Multi-Account Containers add-on.
Extensions
- uBlock Origin is what I use for blocking ads
- Cookie AutoDelete deletes cookies and such automatically when I close a tab, like it says on the tin
- HTTPS Everywhere tries to run as much of my traffic over encrypted connections (HTTPS) as possible
- Gesturefy lets me use mouse gestures for many common browser tasks. At least on my work laptop, my personal laptop rarely has a mouse connected…
Other stuff
On the Themes side I’m currently on a “dark period” so I’m just using the default Dark Theme. I’m also using Firefox Sync. It used to be quite handy when I was using both a desktop and a laptop, but currently I’m mostly syncing between my laptop and mobile phone. It’s also nice to have a backup of my browser settings for when I decide to do a reinstall etc.
Bubbling under
I have a habit of running into interesting articles and bookmarking them, never to actually read them. It might be an interesting experiment to use Pocket to save those pages and then never read them.
EFF’s Privacy Badger might be a worthy addition to uBlock Origin, or totally redundant. Might take a closer look some day, or not.
I should totally hand in my geek card, but I’ve never used NoScript Security Suite.
Sometimes I’ve used the Image Search Options and Video DownloadHelper, but currently I don’t even have those installed. I started to use youtube-dl to a while ago and haven’t really looked back. I need to download stuff from YouTube so rarely that it’s simpler to use the command line than install a plugin, configure it and maybe even wander around in an ever-changing user interface before getting the job done. youtube-dl also has cool options for downloading entire playlists.
