Episode: 3851
Title: HPR3851: Firefox extensions
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3851/hpr3851.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 06:39:47

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3851 from Monday the 8th of May 2023.
Today's show is entitled Firefox Extensions.
It is hosted by Ken Fallon and is about seven minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, Ken walks through a list of extensions he has installed in Firefox and why he uses them.
Hi everybody, my name is Ken Fallon and you are listening to another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
Today I want to talk to you about the browser add-ons that I've added to Firefox.
I'm going to break them down into three different sections.
The first section is probably fixing issues with the browser itself.
And the first one is restoring the RSS icon.
And that's awesome RSS.
And that puts the RSS add-ons subscribe button back in the URL bar.
This used to be there before.
And it allowed people to go to websites.
And when they got there, they could subscribe to the RSS feed.
This has been removed by many browsers.
I won't go into the reasons why that has happened.
But I find it very sad that Mozilla at least has moved that from Firefox.
And with this awesome RSS, you can put it back there again.
The next two are to deal with the same issue,
which is that people prevent you from copying or pasting onto a web page.
In the, in the, they in attempts that will prevent
your improvements, their security, which it won't,
because anybody's coming to their web page will know about these things.
So it essentially makes you the accessibility of your website a lot worse.
For example, not being able to copy prevents me,
at least from reading using a screen we do,
to do text-to-speech on my web page.
And the inability to paste prevents me from pasting in a long complicated password
into a website from my password manager.
So both of those are, the first one is Absolute Enable, Right, Click,
Upper Sound Copy, Clicking Copy.
And then the next one is Don't Effort Paste.
And that F is four letter word.
Both links to these are in the show notes for this episode.
The next one is, the next section is about extensions
that I use to improve my privacy, I guess, and security.
We've already mentioned a browser integration to my password manager,
which is KeepPass XC.
And the KeepPass XC browser plugin allows me to connect to my KeepPass XC press
button, and then it'll populate the username and password.
So that's quite good.
Another invaluable plugin, also a mobile,
is U-Block Origin, which will remove advertisements from web pages and YouTube, etc.
So obviously won't stop advertisements that are loaded on the page
by the business themselves.
So, also very little more as I say.
The next one is Firefox Multi-Account Containers,
which is a preview feature, as soon as you get meted in,
where you open a new tab, you can choose to restrict it to a separate container.
And cookies and session information from one container are not linked to the other.
It's quite useful if you don't have to go to Facebook or something.
You open that in a separate container, and then all that session information
is just kept on that one container and not shared.
It's not to say they can't get around it, but it's a start at least.
And then the last one is Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on,
which is supplied by Google directly.
And it's a sad word old that we have to go to a company to get a browser to block that company
from getting information from you.
But that is the world we live in.
So, those are the more general ones that I'd more or less recommend everybody has.
And then these ones, the next few, are I use them primarily for work,
testing web APIs and stuff that we're doing.
The first one is User Agent Switcher, which I guess sometimes you will need to use
to fool Netflix into thinking that your Windows or something.
It's not as critical as the ones was, but sometimes you need to use that.
Then there's a browser extension called mod header.
This is the second to last, and this allows you to modify header responses and cookies
and filter URLs and stuff.
So it gives you great control over the addition of separate headers.
If you want to eject those in a payload, go back to a browser.
And the most useful one by far in this section, at least, is cookies.text,
which exports all cookies to a Netscape HGTP cookie file,
which can be used by Coral WGET or YouTube DL among others.
And this is super if you've got a website that's got using a password and two-factor authentication on it.
And you still want to be able to use those Coral commands and automated commands to be able to get to it.
What you can do is log in one time via your browser, export that cookies.text file,
and then have that available for that session.
Bearing in mind, of course, there are security implications associated with this,
but my, as I said, this is used for work and testing websites and stuff,
so quite often we're messing around with cookies and stuff like that.
So that was the extensions that I use.
If you use the similar extensions, are there some extensions that you have that you find inviable?
Can you please record a show and tell us about it that would be absolutely fantastic.
So that's it for me.
Chin and tomorrow for another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio.
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