hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3862.txt

Episode: 3862
Title: HPR3862: Firefox Extensions
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3862/hpr3862.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 06:50:30

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3862 for Tuesday the 23rd of May 2023.
Today's show is entitled Firefox Extensions.
It is hosted by Archer 72 and is about 10 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, Archer 72 goes over extensions used on the desktop, and yes, mobile 2.
Well, this is Archer 72.
Welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
In this episode, I talk about the plugins I use in Firefox on the desktop and also on
the mobile.
You heard that right.
You can use some Firefox plugins on your mobile device with the beta of Firefox.
The desktop will start off with U-block origin, which is basically an ad blocker, and probably
hear that one.
I don't care about cookies, which blocks messages about accepting cookies.
Then I've been using Bitwarden lately, so there's a plugin for that to fill in my passwords,
so I only have to remember one password, and it remembers the rest.
Just make web pages more easy on the eyes.
There's Dark Reader, which is a dark mode for every website.
Take care of your eyes, use dark theme for night and daily browsing.
This eye care extension enables night mode creating dark themes for websites on the fly.
Dark Reader inverts bright colors, making them high contrast and easy to read at night.
You can adjust brightness, contrast, sepia filter, dark mode, font settings, and ignore
lists.
Dark Reader doesn't show ads and doesn't send users data anywhere.
It is fully open source.
A plugin I've been using only lately is Chat GPT Box, which integrates Chat GPT into
your browser.
Say I do a duck.go search, well, this plugin integrates a search box next to duck.go and
allows you to ask your question there.
You can also highlight on a word or set of words and go to the plugin and go to the drop-down
where it says ask and it will answer the question about the sentence or just a couple of words
right in line.
There's also a feature that I found really handy is when it finishes answering the question
you have the option to download the response and markdown.
You can export all the conversations in the JSON file format.
The next plugin I don't use as much as I used to because I've been using in videos since
the episode on getting rid of Google services.
But the add-on is custom video speed for YouTube and you can change the default and current
speed of your YouTube videos.
You can change the speed by steps of 0.1 from 0.1 times to 8 times using sliders, buttons
and or the keyboard.
On a related note, there is sponsor block for YouTube, skip sponsorships, subscription
begging, and more on YouTube videos.
Sponsor sponsor on videos you watch to save others time.
Sponsor block will let you skip over sponsors, intros, outros, subscription reminders and
another annoying parts to YouTube videos.
Sponsor block is a crowdsourced browser extension that lets anyone submit the start and end
times of sponsor segments and other segments of YouTube videos.
You can also skip over non-music sections of music videos.
It is supported by NVIDIA's old YouTube and mobile YouTube.
Another plugin I've used as of late is Tabstash, a no-fuss way to save and restore batches
of tabs as bookmarks.
I usually have several pin tabs, but the other ones that are open, if I just drop down
to the plugin, it stashes all the ones that are un-pinned.
Or if I decide to, I can just shift and select a set of tabs and use the plugin and it
will stash just those tabs.
It will give a timestamp on the sidebar.
The last extension I use on the desktop is Tridactyl.
It is VIM, but in your browser, replace Firefox control mechanism with one modeled on VIM.
This add-on is very usable, but in an early stage of development.
We intend to implement the majority of Vimperator's features.
Control your browser with your keyboard only.
Just comment tasks, you want your browser to perform a bound to a single key press.
The colon key performs some of the actions, like if you do colon and type pin, it pins the
tab, and if you do the same again, it un-pins the tab.
Your case D closes the tab, and lowercase T opens a new tab, and with it our history
of the last ten sites you've typed in, you were else you typed in, and so you either
tab down to go to them or start typing and I'll give you more extensive history of other
places you've been.
Once I've been to the hacker public radio calendar page, quite a few times, to check
how many shows are coming up, I just type lowercase T towards hacker, space, calendar,
and it pops up the URL for the calendar page of hacker public radio.
Another nice feature is typing lowercase F to follow, and then a letter that shows
up on the page corresponding to each link, and that opens a new tab immediately.
If you hit the uppercase F while you're doing that, the link will open in the background.
And if I type colon tab, space, I get a list of my open tabs, and I can narrow it down,
like if I have a couple of duck duck go searches on different tabs, I can type DU, and it'll
populate.
I can type DU, and it will populate the tabs relating to that keyword.
That's all I have for desktop plugins, but as promised, I will go through the short
process of adding plugins to the mobile browser.
First of all, you will need the Firefox beta version, which I'll leave a link in the
show notes to, and a Firefox account which you're logged into on both the desktop and
the mobile.
I'll be doing this on the desktop for ease of use, go to my account, and view my collections,
and on the left hand side, there is a button that says create a collection, so I created
a mobile collection for add-ons.
So now you go to an extension you want to add, in this case, I'm going to use the example
of simple translate, you go about three quarters of the way down the page, and there will be
a drop down on the left hand side for select a collection, and then you drop down and you
select mobile add-ons.
From here you go to Firefox beta on your mobile phone, open any page, go to add-ons, and
then add-on-manager, scroll to the bottom, and tap the plus button to add simple translate.
Some of my mobile plugins are the same as on my desktop Firefox, they are you block origin,
dark reader, bit warden, sponsor block, I don't care about cookies, and additionally there's
a video background play fix, which works on both YouTube and Nvidia's, the last one
I have is YouTube playback speed, which is a little finicky, because you have to go back
in and save the setting again if you want to run faster than one time, and I don't use
it much anymore anyways, but I will still live with the link in the show notes, I actually
use Nvidia's morons, like I've mentioned before, and it has an easier way to access the speed
control.
That's all I have for this episode, feel free to leave comments, or a response show to
any of the shows, or record a show on a topic of your choosing.
Thank you for listening, bye.
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