User poll: Browsers and add-ons!

[theweaselking]

Pop quiz: What web browser do you use by preference, and what add-ons for it can you just not do without?

For me: Firefox, and most of my add-ons are "basic functionality that all browsers should have by default but mysteriously don't."

The first thing I install on Firefox is always Adblock Plus. Add in Adblock Element Hiding Helper and NoScript, and suddenly the web is a serene, peaceful place with no advertising. It's nice. NoScript is a pain in the butt because you have to enable scripting to make a lot of sites work at all, but the disable-by-default model is why I use it. I put up with the expectation that any new site I go to will probably fail, in exchange for knowing that nothing runs without my permission.

After that, Tab Mix Plus is an absolute must-have. Changing width of tabs, showing loading progress bars on tabs, diverting new windows into tabs, multi-row tabs rather than scrolling the tab bar, duplicate tabs.... Tab Mix Plus does all the things tabs should do. For pure browser functionality I've also got Old Location Bar, which disables a bunch of the annoying Location Bar wankery that got added around Firefox 3 - things like "switching to an existing tab rather than opening the URL I told it to open", searching page text to come up with "hints" about which URL I'm typing, etc.

After that... Ghostery blocks web bugs, ad networks, data collectors, etc. ShareMeNot blocks Google, Twitter, Facebook and several other buttons- all those little "share this on" buttons - from appearing, meaning it doesn't load them from the server, meaning it doesn't tell Facebook what websites you've been looking at. Collusion is just very pretty - it shows the web of links and who you've requested data from recently.

Finally I'm into minor functionality stuff. Long URL Please reverts tinyurl and t.co and all the rest of the "compressed links" you see on the web to their full URL, letting you read where a link goes before clicking it. Shocking, I know. Firebug is a web development tool, useful for pulling apart pages and figuring out what's happening under the hood. It's also REALLY useful for it's network monitoring stuff - enable it and load a page, and you'll see which parts of the page were loading in what order, from where, and how long it took. It's really useful for troubleshooting slow websites.

I've also got three legacy add-ons that I just haven't uninstalled. Greasemonkey is a powerful scripting tool, but I don't have any scripts for it running any more - all the functionality I was using it for has been implemented elsewhere. Livejournal Addons *was* really great for auto-expanding comment threads, but doesn't work with the new comment style, and I never used it for any of the other things it does. And Screengrab, for saving entire web pages as images, *was* great and I used it a lot, but it hasn't been updated for compatibility in months.

So: What do you use, and what does it do?

Comments

[ambug666.livejournal.com]

It isn't exactly an add-on, but I always browse within Sandboxie (http://www.sandboxie.com/). It completely isolates my browser and only allows on my hard drive what I want on my hard drive.

I also use FlashBlock, because I don't want animations just starting up when I visit a web page; I want them to start on my command, not just randomly and unexpectedly.

I'll have to check out some of the ones you mention. ShareMeNot, and Ghostery look like things I really really want. AdBlock is a given. I can't focus on a web page if it has animations, and AdBlock helps with that so very very much.

(Edited because it turns out I already have Long URL Please installed. Go me!)

[skington.livejournal.com]

Mac OS Safari, and like you AdBlock and Ghostery (a number of these are effectively cross-platform these days, it appears). Along with Safari's habit of not allowing third-party cookies, and absence of Flash, that makes the Internet tolerable enough that I don't find the need to block javascript. I have an extension called Javascript Blacklist which blocks the particularly obnoxious stuff - I see I have tynt.com, intellitxt.com, kontera.com and snap.com in there, which I vaguely recall are evil websites that do things like try and disable copy and paste.

Ultimate Status Bar I'm not too fond of, but it provides more information that Safari's standard status bar and unshortens links.

YouTube5 attempts to replace the standard Flash interface for YouTube and Vimeo with a native video control. It's been thwarted recently by YouTube's decision to replace the native video player with a horribly slow HTML5 version which maxes out CPU on my machine and starts playing audio, a couple of times, before it's loaded the video, but it still often works.

Incognito disables Google AdSense, Google Analytics and Facebook like buttons; might overlap with Ghostery, not sure.

Page One displays the single-page version of news articles when possible. I do much of my browsing on the iPad these days so I can't speak to how useful it actually is.

Footnotify displays footnotes on e.g. daringfireball.net as inline popovers, so you don't have to scroll down and back up.

BlockTarget tries to prevent links opening in a new window or tab.

FocusOnTheUser replaces Google+ profiles in Google search results with more relevant stuff.

[sola.livejournal.com]

Well, seeing as i just cleaned them out:

- Pocket: tucks away links for later reading. I do a lot of casual browsing on my ipod, and Pocket is useful because it both allows me to list articles for later reading elsewhere and the app will download them for offline use. It's replaced long-mourned del.icio.us for me and added a bit of a bonus besides.

- Invisible Hand price-checks what you're shopping for as you do it and gives a wee pop-up if a better price is found. It's remarkably non-intrusive. Of course, i'm sure it's also scraping plenty of data on my shopping habits, but it's saved me quite a bit of money, so - six of one and half a dozen of the other.

- Missing E is specific to tumblr, but it adds lots of useful buttons that tumblr in its infinite wisdom decided to omit.

- Zotero is my favorite. It not only automagically generates standard references for online articles and archives them, but also allows you to organize them into projects, shuffle them around, etc, all in the browser window. I have no idea how i ever wrote a paper without it. Yay Zotero.


Other than that, i have the standard stealth and usability stuff; list looks pretty similar to yours.

[skiriki.livejournal.com]

Opera (and Opera Mobile for my 'droid thingies). I use Ghostery, one of the YouTube downloaders, and Tab Vault, along with its in-built IRC client, content blocker, password tool, and feed reader. Oh yeah, and I've put Its "please do not track me" flag into use too.

[andrewducker]

AdBlock. Because it makes the web usable.
Tabmix Plus, to make tabs work the way I want them to.
Delicious (for the link posts)
Pocket (to read things later)
Photobucket Uploader
TabSubmit, so that I can shift-click on a form button to submit it in a new tab.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Re: Tabsubmit - so the original tab, with everything you entered into it already, remains?
If so: that's AWESOME, I need that.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

TabSubmit, so that I can shift-click on a form button to submit it in a new tab.

The Mac version of IE (which was so much better than the Windows version) used to do that by default. It was great, good to see there's a current iteration of it.

[kowh.livejournal.com]

Firefox, with the aforementioned:
Adblock Plus
NoScript
TabMixPlus

Just added ShareMeNot and Ghostery.

Others:
Context Style Switcher - For those annoying websites that don't actually require Javascript, but have broken formatting without it and so can't be read. Turning CSS off lets you read them without touching temporary perms in NoScript.
Download Statusbar - Puts downloads into a bar at the bottom of the screen.
DownThemAll - Lets me highlight a list of links and then download them all.
Flashblock - Mostly redundant with NoScript, but lets me block autoplaying stuff on whitelisted sites.
HTTPS Everywhere - Force sites to use HTTPS. Note: Per-site list isn't 100%, I've had to manually disable HTTPS forcing for a few sites.
UI Fixer - Lets you move the Firefox menu button. I use it so it's on my tab bar (my bars go bookmarks, URL/search, then tabs).

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

re: UI Fixer: I've got a metric crapton of UI changes from default. Starting with old-school "file edit view history" style menus, a bookmarks bar, tabs at the tab-level below the address bar, etc.

But I did all of those from the menus or via about:config. No add-on for 'em.

[pappy-legba.livejournal.com]

I use Firefox, because Chrome doesn't let me type in about:config and alter ANYTHING I WANT. Chrome is my backup browser. Being a web developer, I will have Chrome, FF and IE open most of the time at work, along with some VM's for antiquated versions of IE that some people inexplicably still use. At this point I'd rather make a page Lynx-friendly than IE7-friendly.

SearchWP + SearchBarsync are huge for me. SearchWP turns any words you type in the searchbar into buttons, which you can click on to hop through the page for inline search. I like it better than CTRL-F since it's always there, I don't have to re-type what I just typed into Google, and I can easily alternate between search terms. It also can do things like highlight every instance of the string on the page.

SearchBarSync updates the searchbar with anything you typed into, say, a standard google window. Useful in concert with SearchWP

Download Statusbar docks your downloads in the status bar (making the status bar rise up if you've disabled it). Lets you adjust what info is shown and a bunch of other useful options.

Mobile Barcoder generates QR codes from any link on the page, or the current URL. Useful for transferring a link to your computerphone.

I used to use NoScript, but got tired of it nagging me for money every time I restarted. If it was a matter of giving them money to make sure I never saw the nag screen again, I might consider it.

[lightinchains.livejournal.com]

That Mobile Barcoder one MUST GO ON MY WORK PC. For all those links I'm not quite sure I want to open via my employer's connection.

Thanks!

[rbarclay.livejournal.com]

Of course: AdBlock Plus, NoScript, Tab Mix Plus. And FlashBlock, couldn't live without it.

Certificate Patrol - tracks SSL certificate changes.
User Agent Switcher, though that's becoming less necessary as IE market share declines.
Nagios Checker, which adds a little status bar that blinks red if some Nagios check fails.

Ghostery and ShareMeNot (whatever happened to BugMeNot?) look useful, thanks for the tip.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I've got BugMeNot installed, actually. I just haven't needed to use it in months.

[lebeautemps.livejournal.com]

Gosh. I have none of this stuff, makes me feel like I've been wandering about with no web knickers on.

I will investigate asap.

[jerril]

Just Adblock Plus will make you feel like you fell into a new internet, where everything loads faster and isn't being carried around by a horde of clowns screaming for your attention.

AdBlock Plus does have, by default, a little checkbox that defaults to "ON" that whitelists what the designers feel are "discrete, well-behaved, text based advertisements". You can turn it off if you want to surf entire adfree - my mother leaves it on for some reason but whatever.

[jerril]

Firefox.
Statusbar4Evar - because DAMN KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN I want my Firefox 3 status bar back.
Classic Compact theme + Classic Compact Options extension to tinker with it. Because Damn kids, lawn, etc.
Adblock Plus, Ghostery, Google Analytics Opt-out browser addon, NoScript, ShareMeNot, ImageBlock because not only does this make me harder to profile, it ALSO makes my internet a quiet zen garden with surprisingly faster surfing. Imageblock is sort of a brute force solution to "I hate your website" but it's an ancient tried and true solution. Combined with "No styles thanks" it's pretty impressive.
Stylish allows me to target a specific website with my own CSS instead of (or on top of) theirs - if I keep using "No style" on a page I keep coming back to, I write a Stylish sheet that fixes the problem automagically for me.
Tab Mix Plus, because everything our host said.
HTTPS-Everywhere - automatically redirects me to the https version of a lot of major websites so I don't accidentally log in or surf on the nonencrypted side.
Toggle Word Wrap - toggles word wrapping on plain .txt files opened in browser, PRE elements, and similar content.

And then I just have two "frivolous" plugins:
Tea Timer, which puts a little timer on my status bar for, yes, making tea (and snacks) and making sure I don't forget them,
TinEye Reverse Image Search - adds a Tin Eye search context menu item to images. Since almost nothing I look for is on Tin Eye, this is sort of pointless, but I like it anyways.

[jerril]

You may notice that my two main problems can be summed up as "Website creators are morons and make crappy websites", and "Website creators are morons, so they let other morons attach crap to their crappy websites."

Or possibly just "I hate humans".

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

RequestPolicy. Blocks cross-site links until you whitelist them (by origin, destination, or both). This cripples the web by default but once you've whitelisted everyone's CDn while not whitelisting their ad server, things work fantastically. It almost makes AdBlock unnecessary, and it definitely eclipses ShareMeNot until you whitelist google.com (sadly needed for many sites).

NoSquint and Stylish, because my sizes/fonts darnit.

Table2Clipboard: does what it says, pasting to Excel works great.

DownThemAll! v useful for mass-downloading files. Linky for links.

Searchbar Autosizer to blank my search string after I hit enter. Honestly don't understand why this isn't the default behavior now that search history exists.

LastPass.

Plus all the ones you mentioned.

[ed-dirt.livejournal.com]

Firefox, with a spellcheck and a youtube downloader.

[calankh.livejournal.com]

adblock and flashblock, for reasons stated above.

Old default image style 2.1 because centering images on a black background is icky

snaplinks plus - right click and drag opens all links within the box as new tabs
load tabs progressively - because if you open lots of tabs at once, lag is an issue
reload every - for websites that you need realtime updates on, but don't want to keep hitting f5 for

I need to check out the tab mix plus, ghostery, and sharemenot. I suspect those will become indispensable.

[tsunami-ryuu.livejournal.com]

Firefox
- Adblock Plus
- NoScript (love this add-on, has probably saved me from countless viruses)
- Abduction (great for taking screenshots of entire window contents)

[ice-hesitant.livejournal.com]

AdBlock Plus

Greasemonkey - I've written a couple scripts to make banning spammers easier on MediaWiki

HTTPS Everywhere - Default to HTTPS for sites that support it.

LastPass - Synchronized cross-browser password manager.

RSS Icon - Firefox 3.0-style feed icon in the address bar.

Search by Image for Google - Like TinEye, but less effective.

StumbleUpon - Useless crap that I need for work because we sometime advertise with them.

Stylish - I find myself fixing horrible usability issues in sites that I want to use but can't. For example, the <- Previous 1 2 3 4 5 Next -> navigators are often 1/3 to 1/5 of the size they should be on discussion sites and picture galleries.

TabSubmit - Submit the form to a new tab so you keep the form open. Very useful on sites that clear the form on back-forward.

TinEye Reverse Image Search - Invaluable way to find original sources for an image or a higher quality version.

Tree Style Tab - Because tab titles are a lot more readable when stacked vertically.

Web Developer - If nothing else, Ctrl+Shit+F is a good way to figure out the CSS rule to a page element when you're fixing a site with Stylish.

Xmarks - A reliable way to synchronize bookmarks between browsers, so I can alternate between Firefox and Chrome at will.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

Firefox, and these addons I haven't seen mentioned yet: BarTab, Classic Compact (shrunk yet functional UI widgets), Download Statusbar, HTTPS Everywhere, Scriptish (Greasemonkey replacement), Tree Style Tabs.

[opaqueplanet.livejournal.com]

Firefox, with Adblock plus. I don't think I use anything else, because it seems like every time I find an add-on I like, it's out-of-date in three months. I think I'll look into that tea timer, though.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Add-ons now get checked for compatibility automatically, and marked compatible with new versions unless they fail the test.

So it's much rarer to lose an add-on because of a version update.

[cacahuate.livejournal.com]

Not mentioned above:

bookmarks-deiconizer - because I want my bookmarks toolbar to fit tons of crap, not distract me with baubles.
Boomerang for Gmail - lets me schedule emails to me sent later.
EPUBReader - my preferred desktop ePub reader, because apparently no decent ones exist for Mac, at least last I checked. Anyway, an ePub might as well be a website, so why not treat it like one?
FaviconizeTab - shrink a tab to the width of the favicon.
Lazarus - form recovery that has saved my ass a few times.
MeasureIt - a wee ruler for yer browser
Open Image in New Tab - what it says on the tin, adds a context menu item for this
Missing e and XKit - make Tumblr almost usable!

[sola.livejournal.com]

OMG, Lazarus. Thanks for this!

[whisperkit.livejournal.com]

Thankyou, I didn't know about a lot of these.

[secretagentmoof]

Firefox, and:
DownloadHelper (if I want to see something on YouTube that I've watched more than twice before, it's time to download it; my playlists usually end up being 50% or more "This video has been deleted due to...")
DownThemAll (when I want to manually spider sites - especially archive.org mirrored stuff.)
NukeAnythingAdvanced (really long annoying picture screwing up the formatting of your page? remove it!)
QuickJava (a couple of buttons to disable/reenable JS, Flash, CSS, etc)
Rikaichan (mouseover Japanese text, and it'll give you possible word translations)

[gygaxis.livejournal.com]

Firefox, adblock is a given, searchbar autosizer cause it should just be the right size, and the two that keep me from using any other browser, grab and drag and fire gestures. Grab and drag gives you a momentum including hand for a cursor and scroll with, most important because I browse with my tablet as well as the mouse, and fire gestures, cause context menus are for suckers, and so I can save images off whiny sites. I also REALLY miss the functionality of Bar Tab in the ACTUALLY loading tabs on demand. My browser runs with a lot of tabs for research frequently and I HATE restoring a crash and all 100+ loading at once and some burried youtube song link playing for 10 minutes stop and go.

[xomox.livejournal.com]

I've been using AdMuncher (http://www.admuncher.com/) for years, and find that I need nothing else. Yes, it costs, but next to nothing, and has been continually updated the 10 years since I've bought it, both program and filter-wise. Windows-only, but that doesn't really bother me these days.