New laptop part 6: Firefox extensions

I mostly use firefox as my main browser. I say mostly because I open chromium from time to time on website that refuse to work on firefox. The main reason I’m using firefox is because it isn’t based on webkit / blink… Yes that really why… It is more a militant act fighting against Alphabet/Google dictating their low about web standards¹ (they already do but they will do worse and worse the more people use their web engine). If that wasn’t for this main reason, I’d probably use qutebrowser a lot more.

This is why I’m always sad when I see news from mozilla I don’t like. Their latest change allowing them to silently block add-on on specific site is not only very scary in term of security, it is also a direct attack to users freedom and a clear breach of trust (once again)… But there is no real alternative without giving up to webkit / blink based browser. I use 2 version of firefox, nightly for my day to day browsing and stable for my work related web browsing. Each use a specific profile. While reinstalling my laptop earlier this year, I thought it would be an interesting short blog post to talk about the different extensions I use.

Before that, just a quick tip to unsure nightly is the default browser used (chromium changes that config after installing it):

xdg-mime default firefox-nightly.desktop x-scheme-handler/https
xdg-mime default firefox-nightly.desktop x-scheme-handler/http

The above 2 commands should do the trick.

Regarding extensions, I’m using the following ones:

• SideBery: The best add-on (IMHO) to manage tabs if, like me, you are a tab addict! Not only it has a clean and slick vertical UI, but it works perfectly (and better than my experience with Tree Style Tab)
• uBlock Origin: Famous add-on to block adds
• HTTPS Everywhere: To force traffic to https on all sites. Nota: As nice reader shared with me, this is actually not needed on desktop version of firefox anymore as the option is in Firefox UI now. See their blog post for more information.
• LibRedirect: To use alternative website to GAFAM ones
• Privacy Badger: Block trackers
• Wallabager: Allow sending web pages to wallabag, a read-it-later opensource service
• Linkding Injector: When doing a web search, this add-on will also look into my bookmark library (managed via linkding) to show me matching results if any.

I’m not sure if this is too much or not, but that’s what I’ve been using since I moved to this new laptop. What about you?

TIPS: If you use sidebery and want to hide the default horizontal tab bar, you need to write a small css file.

Edit ~/.mozilla/firefox/<profileName>/chrome/userChrome.css (or create it if it doesn’t exist yet) to add:

#TabsToolbar {
  display: none;
}

#sidebar-header {
  display: none;
}

And voilà! Just for fun, a quick screenshot:

Figure 1: Firefox screenshot