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Firefox Power Users Reveal Their Essential Add-ons for an Enhanced 2025 Web Experience

View original discussion on Hacker News

As Firefox users look towards 2025, the quest for the optimal browsing experience continues, with a strong emphasis on enhancing privacy, productivity, and overall web usability through carefully selected add-ons. The discussion reveals a consensus on several core tools, alongside a variety of specialized extensions catering to individual needs.

The Undisputed Champion: Ad and Tracker Blocking

uBlock Origin stands out as the cornerstone of nearly every recommended setup. Its effectiveness in blocking ads and trackers is unparalleled, and many users leverage its advanced features, such as disabling JavaScript by default and enabling it only for trusted sites. This granular control is seen as a significant privacy and performance win.

Fortifying Privacy: Beyond Ad Blocking

Privacy remains a top concern, leading to a multi-layered approach:

  • Containerization: Firefox Containers are widely used to isolate browsing sessions (e.g., work, personal, banking). For even stricter isolation, Temporary Containers (often with "Automatic Mode") ensure each new tab or link opens in a fresh, isolated environment. This significantly mitigates cross-site tracking.
  • Script Control: Beyond uBlock Origin's capabilities, NoScript offers dedicated, fine-grained control over JavaScript, Flash, and other plugins, appealing to security-conscious users.
  • Cookie Management: Cookie AutoDelete is favored for its ability to automatically remove cookies when a tab is closed, further preventing tracking.
  • URL Cleaning & Redirection: ClearURLs removes tracking elements from URLs, while Redirector or LibRedirect allow users to automatically rewrite URLs (e.g., to privacy-respecting frontends like old.reddit.com or Tor versions of sites).
  • General Privacy Suites: Privacy Badger and Privacy Possum are also mentioned as helpful additions to a privacy-focused toolkit.

Enhancing Productivity and User Experience

Users are also keen on add-ons that streamline workflows and make browsing more enjoyable:

  • Dark Mode: Dark Reader is a popular choice for applying a dark theme to all websites, reducing eye strain.
  • YouTube Enhancements: SponsorBlock auto-skips sponsored segments in videos, Enhancer for YouTube adds various playback controls, and Return YouTube Dislike restores the dislike count visibility.
  • Tab Management & New Tab Pages: Tab Stash helps manage numerous open tabs, potentially improving performance. For new tab customization, Group Speed Dial offers quick access to favorite sites, and one user shared their own Todos-New-Tab extension for daily goal visibility.
  • Search and Content Filtering: uBlacklist allows users to remove specific sites (like Medium or Quora) from Google search results, and Hide Google AI Overviews removes the AI-generated summaries from search pages.
  • Usability Tweaks: Buster: captcha solver for humans helps bypass ReCaptchas. Behind The Overlay Revival tackles annoying overlays. Drag-select Link Text emulates an old Opera feature for easier text selection.
  • Password Management: Securely managing credentials is key, with 1Password and Bitwarden being the recommended password manager extensions.

Specialized and Advanced Tools

Some users employ more niche add-ons:

  • RSS: Awesome RSS helps extract RSS feed links.
  • Proxy Management: FoxyProxy offers advanced proxy and VPN configuration.
  • Developer & Power User Tools: One veteran developer noted that while they used to develop many extensions, now only uBlock Origin is essential, sometimes using Brave (with its built-in blocker) or Safari for testing.

One particularly dedicated user described their 'masochist anti-tracking set up,' which involves uBlock Origin with JavaScript disabled globally, Temporary Containers in automatic mode for full session isolation for all tabs, and permanent named containers only for essential logged-in services. This highlights the extent to which users will go to protect their privacy and control their browsing environment.

Ultimately, while uBlock Origin is the near-universal starting point, the ideal Firefox add-on arsenal for 2025 is a personalized selection tailored to individual priorities around privacy, productivity, and web interaction.