Episode: 1728
Title: HPR1728: Requested Topic: Favourite Browser Extensions
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1728/hpr1728.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 08:18:59

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This is HPR episode 1,728 entitled Requested Topic Favorite Browser Extensions.
It is hosted by first-time host Finn and is about 20 minutes long.
The summary is Finn talks about his favorite browser extensions.
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Hi, this is Finn. Welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
I'd like to talk to you about browser extensions.
This is one of the requested topics listed at HackerPublicRadio.org.
My browser of choice is Firefox.
I choose Firefox because I like what the Mozilla Foundation do.
Chromium is a good alternative to Firefox, Chromium, the open source project that is.
I find the available extensions to be generally better on Firefox than Chromium.
Also, Ahuka did a show on Hacker Public Radio recently where he talked about certificates
and he mentioned that Firefox handles security certificates slightly better than Chromium
or Chromium.
So, that backs up my choice.
The extensions I use in Firefox are primarily geared towards security and privacy while
browsing the web.
The extensions I use in Firefox are primarily concerned with privacy and security.
So when I do a fresh install of Firefox or I install a fresh, the next distribution
that includes Firefox, one of the first things I'll do is go and install some extensions.
In no particular order, I will install no script.
No script is available from the Mozilla Plugin website.
They have a nice informative web page as well at noescript.net.
If you do install no script, it will automatically redirect your home page to their home page
occasionally.
This is a bit irritating but considering it's free software is in free of charge to download
and install and they make what I think is quite a good piece of software, I can deal
with them asking for donations every now and then which is how I perceive their redirection
to their home page.
So what does noescript do?
Noescript blocks JavaScript.
It also blocks Java and Flash and other plugins that have security issues.
For me, I primarily use it to block JavaScript and Flash.
Now, this isn't to say that noescript prevents all JavaScript and Flash and these other
plugins that it blocks permanently.
There is a nice feature where you have a drop down menu by default in the main bar at
the top of the window with Firefox.
On my screen, it generally appears to the right of the search field and that allows you
to micro-manage your scripts.
So if I visit a web page and for some reason the page is completely blank or there's obvious
content missing or some formatting issues, generally it's because that website is using
a script for these purposes.
So what I'll typically do is I'll look at the list of scripts that are blocked through
this menu that are blocked by noescripts and I'll start off by a temporary allowing the
top-level script.
So for example, if I go on the noescript.net page, I see that there is one script on the
page according to the drop down menu and the script is coming from noescript.net.
So the menu from noescript in the browser, the browser plugin that is, sorts the scripts
by what domain the scripts are coming from, which is particularly useful for my purposes
as I'll explain as I go along.
So the way I have no scripts configured and you can change this is that when you select
the script that you want to enable from the drop down menu, it automatically then refreshes
the page.
So then I instantly see the content that may or may not be missing according to that
particular script.
As far as noescript.net is concerned, they only have scripts from noescript.net.
And to be honest, upon allowing that script, I don't perceive any usability changes to
the website.
So I'm going to go back to the noescript menu and then click forbid noescript.net.
So that will once again forbid the scripts on this page and refresh the page.
And so I'm not missing out on this particular page with any scripts, which is what I like
to find.
And to be honest, looking at noescript.net, before having enabled any scripts, I would not
assume that I'm really missing anything.
Everything appears to be there, the page appears to be correctly formatted.
And so I'm happy with it.
What I typically like to use no script for is websites that embed scripts from other websites.
So for example, you might visit a page and there's some social media links on the page.
And what those pages typically do is report to those particular social media websites where
you are.
They say, oh, this user has access to this web page.
And this is their IP address, I presume they might even set a cookie, things like that.
It's a form of tracking basically.
I prefer not to be tracked by websites that I'm not specifically visiting, especially
social media websites, which I intentionally choose not to use for the purpose of protecting
my own data.
And so if I visit websites with scripts from other domains such as Facebook, Twitter,
Google, I'd rather not have those websites know I'm there.
The extent to which these websites can track you by other means, other than scripts, maybe
the website you're visiting that has these scripts and other websites will report your
IP address to other domains anyway, I don't know.
But having a small measure of protection certainly sets me at ease ever so slightly.
Another nice feature of no script is its flash blocking capabilities, which I appreciate
for the blocking of flash on websites that have flash ads, or maybe they have some other
flash content that's obtrusive and not relevant to the main content of the web page.
And so flash is typically replaced with a box taking up the same amount of space on
the page that the flash element would.
And if you do want to run the flash element on the page, you can simply click that box
and typically a pop-up will appear from no script saying, you know, you're sure you want
to do this and you can just click proceed or whatever the box is to continue and execute
that flash and it will do that for you.
This is something I might use on a website like YouTube where, for example, if you enable
no scripts, it's really not a useful website.
So at the very least, you would want to enable scripts from youtube.com, now YouTube has
a number of scripts from other domains as well, typically there's a domain y-timing, I believe
y-timing.com.
And that will allow YouTube to execute scripts that handle playlists, for example.
So if you want to watch a playlist on YouTube, you would also need to enable that script.
But this enables me to leave scripts to say board, for example, any scripts from google.com
which then would run other scripts, which includes their APIs for Google Plus, which means
I miss out on the comments, but you know, who's really that interested in the bottom half
of the internet anyway, especially on a website like YouTube.
One of the scripts has some other nice features like there's a white list built in, so you
can have scripts permanently loud from websites that you visit regularly and you trust their
scripts.
I believe there are other options for information in the status bar of Firefox, which I don't
use, and pop up to a lot, you when scripts are being blocked, but I know that I'm always
blocking scripts, so I don't use that feature either.
But it's there if that's something you think would be useful to you.
So once again, noescript.net, if you want more information about it, go there or just
head over to the Mozilla plugin website and grab it and install it, see how you go.
I think that's about enough regarding no scripts, so I'll move on to again in no particular
order.
One of the other browser extensions that I always install with a fresh Firefox or fresh
distribution includes Firefox, and that is HTTPS everywhere.
Now HTTPS everywhere is very simple.
It just redirects you to the secure version of any website that you attempt to visit.
If there is no secure version, I believe it will just default to you to the HTTP version
of the website, but typically these days websites have a secure version, so you can access
it via HTTPS instead.
It's just a convenience plugin, so I don't have to type HTTPS, call on forward slash
slash www. and then the rest of the domain name for every single website I want to visit.
Now obviously the secure version of a website uses encryption and to end between your browser
and their server, so someone who's interested in what you're up to would be able to see which
website you're visiting, they just wouldn't necessarily be able to see the actual pages being
transported from the server to your browser and any form data, for example, that's going
from your browser back to the server.
Now HTTPS everywhere is slightly different from the other plugins that I typically use
and that it's not on the Mozilla plugin website.
It comes directly from the EFF, the electronic frontier foundation.
You can find them over at EFF.org, but I typically just search for HTTPS everywhere and that
takes me directly to their page with one click installs for the plugins.
They also do a version for Chromium, so if you do happen to be using Google Chrome slash
Chromium, you can install it on that browser too and I believe also Opera.
There's not really much more to say about HTTPS everywhere, so I'll move on to my third
plugin that I install habitually in Firefox, which is ad block edge.
Now ad block edge might be a bit overkill considering I've already got no script installed,
but there's a habit of mine and it's a nice ad blocking tool.
You might want to use just ad block edge without no script if you're purely interested
in blocking ads and not so concerned with scripts generally.
So what ad block edge does is very similar to another plugin that I'm aware of called
ad block plus.
If you're interested in ad block, you might have already heard of ad block plus, but you
might not have heard of ad block edge.
As far as my understanding goes, ad block edge is a fork of ad block plus.
To make up for ad block pluses or mission of certain ads and certain websites, Google
is one that I'm aware of, I'm aware there are others.
So ad block plus has a default built in white list, which allows a set of ads through.
It deems them unobtrusive.
It has a certain set of rules as to whether ads are particularly intrusive or not.
And we'll let certain ads through if they adhere to this set of rules that they've come
up with.
From my understanding, ad block edge doesn't have a similar set of rules for unobtrusive
style ads.
It just straight up blanket blocks all ads or at least all ads that can detect.
Now you might be more interested in ad block plus if the main reason you want to block
ads is for their intrusive nature on many websites.
Personally, I find even unobtrusive ads may include some kind of tracking nature to
them.
For example, if it's a Google ad, Google will know that you're on that web page, or at
least they'll know that you as an IP addresses on that web page, they may already have
collected other data on you, so I have a bigger picture of who you are based on that
IP address.
And so this is another thing that I like to try to avoid if possible.
So I'll just leave all ads blocked just to be as safe as I can.
The final plug-in I'll talk about today is a recent addition to the set that I like
to install.
It's called no squint.
And what that does is basically set a default zoom for all web pages globally in Firefox.
So what I find I would often be doing was I like to use the shortcut control plus rather
than the menu, but however you do it, I find myself zooming lots of pages.
I find the default size of text on many web pages is too small for my comfortable viewing
distance from the screen.
And so no squint allows me to not have to do that anymore.
I just go to whatever website that happens I want to look at and the default zoom is
slightly more than, well what the website was designed to be viewed at.
Unfortunately this results in slightly overlapping elements on some pages, but then you can just
zoom out again.
I generally set no squint to 130% default zoom, so that allows me a comfortable zoom for
the text and images for the distance I like to sit from the screen.
You could obviously set that to something different depending on what display I'm looking
at, if it's particularly small display, so zooming in too much means that you miss some
of the content, it gets pushed off the edge of the screen.
I'll set the zoom slightly lower, so on a small laptop I have I generally set the zoom
to about 115% by default, either way slightly larger than normal, slightly more comfortable
reading.
So that rounds out the set of extensions I like to install in Firefox, every time I install
Firefox.
There is a number of other extensions that I don't use but have used, and I think it
might be worth mentioning, at least mentioning my reservations, just in case you're interested
in trying these extensions out and want a bit more information about them, or maybe you
use them and you have some pros that I've missed and some alleviations for the cons that
I highlight, so please feel free to record a response podcast of this, follow up or contact
me.
My contact details will be at the end of the podcast.
Let's cut to the chase.
LibraJS, another way of blocking JavaScript on websites that may be undesirable.
LibraJS is from the GNU project, it is designed to block not only any scripts on a web page
like no script, but it will block specifically non-free JavaScript, and so what they deem to
be non-free JavaScript is any JavaScript that's been obfuscated in some way, there's a kind
of compiled version of JavaScript that is kind of minified, so the browser can potentially
execute it faster, then it might be able to execute the JavaScript normally, but obviously
that obscures the actual source code of the JavaScript, so you couldn't necessarily just
read the script that your browser is executing from the source of the page and understand
what's going on there.
So LibraJS will try to identify scripts like that and block those, and it does a very
good job at that.
Unfortunately for my use, I found it's script blocking to be a bit too heavy-handed, I mean
of course it does its best to identify what scripts should be blocked and blocks the
relevant ones and allows other scripts through.
Unfortunately I found that some websites that I like to use or need to use have scripts
on them that are non-free scripts, but within LibraJS it's very hard to micromanage your
scripts as I described with no scripts, so if I wanted to allow some scripts on a website
to allow me to use the website, even if they're non-free scripts, it was kind of an all
or nothing experience from what I recall, so it was allow scripts from this website, all
the scripts from this website, in which case you get all the non-free scripts that are
undesirable along with the non-free scripts that I needed to use.
And it was kind of difficult to micromanage.
In addition, LibraJS provides what I think is quite a nice feature in that it tries to
search the website for any contact so you can let them know that they're running non-free
scripts if per chance they don't already know that they're running non-free scripts or
maybe they're unaware of the issues around free software, and it will prompt you if you
wish with those contact details and the way to get to those contact details is a tab on
the right-hand side of the page labeled complain, so the implication there is that you would
complain to the website owner or the website developer who is maintaining the website, whatever
contact details LibraJS manages to lift out of the website.
In order for you to let them know that they're using non-free scripts and try and encourage
them to change their driver scripts and make it free software.
So I found LibraJS to be an extremely noble cause like most of free software, but unfortunately
like some free software I run into and I'm talking about free as in freedom now rather
than free as in free of cost.
LibraJS just crosses the line of usability, so yes I can still use the internet, yes I can
still view web pages, but a lot of web pages that I needed to use or wanted to use they
which just weren't useful anymore so I couldn't use them for whatever reason.
Also no script that I talked about at the beginning of this podcast does block scripts
in the same way that LibraJS blocks scripts.
It doesn't make the distinction between free JavaScript and non-free JavaScript.
I did try using the two in conjunction so that I knew LibraJS would be blocking non-free
scripts and no scripts would be blocking all scripts, so I could do what I was usually
doing with no script, micromanaging which scripts I enabled and which scripts I didn't
so that the top level scripts typically have a website that had JavaScript on I would
enable and that would get most of the content going, usually fine, maybe I'd have to enable
one other script from another domain to allow me to see more content or some embedded media
and then LibraJS would be another filter on that so if any of those were non-free scripts
they'd also be blocked so that I kind of get the best of both, but unfortunately this
kind of combination just made websites basically unusable or at least the extent that I'd
spend most of my browsing time managing scripts rather than actually consuming the content
that was interested in.
Well that about covers the browser plugins that I like to use.
This has been Finn for Hacker Public Radio and I hope to speak to you again soon.
If you have any comments or questions regarding this podcast you can reach me at the email
address, Finn is now at stf.org, that's F-I-N-I-S-N-O-W, at stf.org.
If you have comments on today's show please email the host directly, leave a comment
on the website or record a follow-up episode yourself, unless otherwise status, today's
show is released on the create of comments, attribution, share a light 3.0 license.