#firefox extensions

so first we have our bare essentials, UBlock Origin and Privacy Badger. the best adblocker youll ever have that even works on youtube (which sometimes yt cracks down on it, just reload over and over or switch to a private browsing tab and paste your video to watch it there with no ads, works every time and in a day or two it'll be working just fine again), and badger blocks hidden trackers while you're browsing

Port Authority blocks malicious websites from scanning your computer

Privacy Possum fucks up any commercial data a site gathers from your computer and reports back false info instead of your real info

ClearURLs gets rid of all the tracking elements in your URLs, and instead just gives you the straight site

Consent-O-Matic automatically handles (or at least minimmizes) the cookie pop-ups you have to agree or decline to, and declines everything except what's necessary for the site to run (and you can customize it as well)

Cookie AutoDelete does what it sounds like it does. When you close your tab, it gets rid of any unnecessary cookies from the site

Decentraleyes protects against tracking through "free", centralized, content delivery

LocalCDN is a fork of Decentraleyes that emulates content delivery networks and prevents 3rd party tracking

Location Guard hides your geographic location from websites, or reports a fake one. It doesn't replace a VPN, but prevents location tracking from being too precise by adding noise

CanvasBlocker and Chameleon help stop JavaScript from fingerprinting your visited sites and spoofs your info respectively

TrackMeNot protects you against search data profiling by giving false searches to the sites requesting information, similar to possum

FlagFox puts a little country flag in your searchbar telling you where the website's server is located

Anti-Adblock Blocker is what it sounds like, it blocks the majority of common anti-adblock solutions

SponsorBlock and Return Youtube Dislike skip sponsored segments on yt and bring back the dislike stats on videos

Hide Google AI Overviews, Slop Evader, and Microslop get rid of the annoying AI overview that's not even right more than half the time at the top of your searches, removes most AI results, and will change every instace of the word Micros*ft on your computer to Microslop even in youtube subtitles

Malwarebytes Browser Guard has saved me from malicious links a handful of times, and doesn't flag every little thing ever (Malwarebytes is great to have on your computer in general, it can scan your computer for anything unsafe and quarantine anything that is, for free. you can get antivirus too if you pay)

Chrome Mask some websites are little pieces of shit and don't want us to have nice things, so if they only work for chrome, just turn this on and boom baby your site works it thinks you're on chrome

Nitter Redirect if you're like me and refuse to get on twitter but still want to be able to view links your favorite people send you, this lets you look at them without making an account

Ghostery - Privacy Adblocker helps take care of anything your other adblockers or cookie handlers might have missed, and helps speed up your browsing experience

Animalese Typing 10/10 no notes

CustomTube restores old Youtube UI in case you miss it

And I also use DuckDuckGo ofc

its called unhook, and it completely removes the recommendations section on the main page of youtube. this is what it looks like on my phone but i have it on my desktop too

it has basically reduced my "completely forgot time exists and lost myself to the abyss of Endless Video" episodes to once or twice a month, when i accidentally end up on shorts through someone im subscribed to.

i can just go straight to the searchbar or the 'subscribed' page without being immediately distracted by whats taking up the rest of the screen.

and when there is no recommendations or trending page, there is no algoritm to fuck up by a specific search you did one time or a series of videos you watched earlier but have no interest in outside of that. no 'trending', no clickbait or ragebait, no breaking news, no doomscrolling.

it also blocks the recommendations that appear under any specific video you are watching, like this:

there are loads more options for what to filter! i also have ads, banners and notifications turned off to further simplify the UI and reduce distraction.

shorts can likewise be hidden, but this removes them from any type of search or page, so thats something i personally chose not to enable.

ive used this extension for well over 6 months now, and never experienced any bugs or issues as far as i can tell. just bliss.

i dont really do this normally cause thats not the type of following/mutuals i have but it deserves to get a small shoutout anyway.

EDIT 1-15-2026: fixed broken adblock test link

Blocking ads on our phones is way harder than it should be so I figured I'd make some recommendations. These are not the only options out there, just the ones that I know and have used.

Please note that browser-level and system-level adblocking are complementary; you'll have the best experience if you use both of them together as they each block different things in different places. If you want a basic idea of how effective your combined adblocking setup is, you can visit this website in your mobile browser.

Lastly, there is some additional advice/info under the readmore if you're curious (EDIT: updated March 2025 to add more adblocking options for iOS and to add info about sideloading altered versions of social media apps that don't contain ads on Android and iOS).

Android

Browser-Level

uBlock Origin (for Firefox)

System-Level (works in all apps, not just browsers)

AdGuard

Blokada 5 (completely free version) OR Blokada 6 (has some newer features but they require a subscription)

iPhone/iPad

Browser-Level

AdGuard (Safari extension; free for basic browser-level blocking, requires a subscription or one time purchase of “lifetime” license for custom filters)

1Blocker (Safari extension from an indie developer; can enable one built-in or custom filter list for free, requires a subscription or one time purchase of “lifetime” license for enabling multiple filter lists and updating filter lists to the latest version automatically)

Wipr 2 (one time purchase from indie developer; simplest option to use, but also the least configurable. Best if you are looking for one time set and forget and don’t need any custom filters. Note that it does not have a system-level blocking option)

System-Level (works in all apps, not just browsers)

AdGuard (requires subscription or one time purchase of “lifetime” license for system-level blocking)

1Blocker (can activate without a subscription, but requires subscription or one time purchase of “lifetime” license to enable system-level blocking AND browser-level blocking simultaneously)

AdGuard DNS only (this is free and does not require the AdGuard app, BUT I would only recommend it for advanced users, as you can't easily turn it off like you can with the app. Credit to this Reddit thread for the DNS profile)

Library Extension allows you to see if your library has a book you're interested in and put a hold on it without having to go to the library site to do it.

They have extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.

The extension works for several dozen countries, so it's worth checking if your country is included.

You then select which country subdivision you live in and which library systems you want to add the extension to.

Once the library is added in, when you go to shopping sites like Amazon, you should see on the side whether the library has any copies of the book!

Been awhile since I've had one of these posts but I figure with all that's going on in the world it's time to make another one of these posts and get some stuff out there for people. A lot of the information I'm going to go over you can find here:

So if you'd like to just click the link and ignore the rest of the post that's fine, I strongly recommend checking out the Privacy Guides.

Browsers:

There's a number to go with but for this post going forward I'm going to recommend Firefox. I know that the Privacy Guides lists Brave and Safari as possible options but Brave is Chrome based now and Safari has ties to Apple. Mullvad is also an option but that's for your more experienced users so I'll leave that up to them to work out.

Browser Extensions:

uBlock Origin: content blocker that blocks ads, trackers, and fingerprinting scripts. Notable for being the only ad blocker that still works on Youtube.

Privacy Badger: Content blocker that specifically blocks trackers and fingerprinting scripts. This one will catch things that uBlock doesn't catch but does not work for ads.

Facebook Container: "but I don't have facebook" you might say. Doesn't matter, Meta/Facebook still has trackers out there in EVERYTHING and this containerizes them off away from everything else.

Bitwarden: Password vaulting software, don't trust the password saving features of your browsers, this has multiple layers of security to prevent your passwords from being stolen.

ClearURLs: Allows you to copy and paste URL's without any trackers attached to them.

VPN:

Note: VPN software doesn't make you anonymous, no matter what your favorite youtuber tells you, but it does make it harder for your data to be tracked and it makes it less open for whatever network you're presently connected to.

Mozilla VPN: If you get the annual subscription it's ~$60/year and it comes with an extension that you can install into Firefox.

Proton VPN: Has easily the most amount of countries serviced, can take cash payments, and does offer port forwarding.

Email Provider:

Note: By now you've probably realized that Gmail, Outlook, and basically all of the major "free" e-mail service providers are scraping your e-mail data to use for ad data. There are more secure services that can get you away from that but if you'd like the same storage levels you have on Gmail/Outlook.com you'll need to pay.

Proton Mail: Secure, end-to-end encrypted, and fairly easy to setup and use. Offers a free option up to 1gb

Tuta: Secure, end-to-end encrypted, been around a very long time, and offers a free option up to 1gb.

Email Client:

Thunderbird if you're on Windows or Linux

Apple Mail if you're on macOS

Cloud Storage:

Proton Drive: Encrypted cloud storage from the same people as Proton Mail.

Tresorit: Encrypted cloud storage owned by the national postal service of Switzerland. Received MULTIPLE awards for their security stats.

Peergos: decentralized and open-source, allows for you to set up your own cloud storage, but will require a certain level of expertise.

Microsoft Office Replacements:

LibreOffice: free and open-source, updates regularly, and has the majority of the same functions as base level Microsoft Office.

OnlyOffice: cloud-based, free, and open source.

Chat Clients:

Note: As you've heard SMS and even WhatsApp and some other popular chat clients are basically open season right now. These are a couple of options to replace those.

Signal: Provides IM and calling securely and encrypted, has multiple layers of data hardening to prevent intrusion and exfil of data.

Molly (Android OS only): Alternative client to Signal. Routes communications through the TOR Network.

Briar: Encrypted IM client that connects to other clients through the TOR Network, can also chat via wifi or bluetooth.

Now for the last bit, I know that the majority of people are on Windows or macOS, but if you can get on Linux I would strongly recommend it. pop_OS, Ubuntu, and Mint are super easy distros to use and install. They all have very easy to follow instructions on how to install them on your PC and if you'd like to just test them out all you need is a thumb drive to boot off of to run in demo mode.

If you game through Steam their Proton emulator in compatibility mode works wonders, I'm presently playing a major studio game that released in 2024 with no Linux support on it and once I got my drivers installed it's looked great. There are some learning curves to get around, but the benefit of the Linux community is that there's always people out there willing to help.

I hope some of this information helps you and look out for yourself, it's starting to look scarier than normal out there.

... ok, bitch, so that's how it's gunna be huh?

But fret no longer! Let's talk about Tassel:

Tassel is a script that can run through a script-running browser extension (for example, Tampermonkey), so it's different to XKit / XKit Rewritten in that it isn't actually an extension in itself, but once installed it runs pretty much the same. It adds a "Tassel" button to the sidebar that looks like this:

When you press on it, it gives you the opportunity to customise Pillowfort's UI to your own liking in the following ways:

Added tagging tools, like suggested tags, default tags (like XKit Rewritten's tag bundles), and modifying certain parts of reblogging to communities to make the process smoother

Changing the time format on posts

Showing tags and where a post has been reblogged to

Adding post charts (I don't use this, but I guess like Tumblr's reblog map, almost?)

Changes to blacklisting, so posts can be blocked themselves, and original tags are shown on reblogs

More advanced image censoring, including the ability to change people's icons to the original Pillowfort icon, and the ability to pause GIFs

Adding the ability to mute someone rather than outright blocking them

Subscribing to posts

Better accessibility, including turning alt text into captions beneath images, making the process of adding alt text easier in the first place, and disabling individual fort/blog themes (for example, if they cause eyestrain)

Collapsible comment threads

More accurate sidebar counts

Removing sidebar counts entirely

Adding archives to people's forts/blogs so you can search them better

The ability to open read-mores without opening up the post

A feature to make viewing images easier

Annotations to blocklists (!!!!)

It's easy to turn all these features on and off by simply refreshing the page. Also, when turning on the script for the first time it gives you further information to the right of the dashboard. When you're finished with that, you can click on each module to collapse them.