Firefox

As of May 2022, Firefox is the main web browser I use. I find it slower than Google Chrome (which I use for Facebook, Messenger, Gmail, and YouTube), but find its address bar more useful.

Extensions

Starting in 2021, I decided to reduce the number of extensions I use after learning more about how little auditing goes on for browser extensions and case-studies like The Great Suspender (where the original author sold it to some sketchy people who then put in spyware, or something like that).

• ClearURLs
• Dark Reader
• uBlock Origin
• F.B Purity
• Video DownloadHelper (usually disabled, but I enable it whenever I want to use it)

(Above list is up-to-date as of 2024-03-30.)

Keyword search

I have several custom keyword searches on Firefox. Following DuckDuckGo’s idea of “bang expressions”, I prefix each keyword with ! (even though I don’t use DuckDuckGo).

• !g: google search, https://www.google.com/search?q=%s
• !w: English Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=%s&title=Special%3ASearch
• !d: The Free Dictionary
• !ia: Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/*/%S
• !ias: save with internet archive, https://web.archive.org/save/%S
• !gooj: goo jisho (Japanese dictionary), https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/freewordsearcher.html?MT=%s&mode=0&kind=all

Note that for the Internet Archive keyword searches, use %S rather than %s for the search string placeholder. The latter URL-encodes the search string while the former doesn’t.

I used to use bookmarklets, but have since switched to using an addon (for citation generation) and keyword searches (for accessing websites).

Settings

In about:config:

• Set network.IDN_show_punycode to true

See also

• software I use for more about the software I use

Backlinks

• analytics for this site
• Chrome
• software I use
• computing