alt Hacker NewsHopefully people will start learning that you want to install as few browser extensions as possible.
Replies
probably_wrong • today at 12:52 PM
My honest reaction to your comment is "What? No!".
I want to block ads, block trackers, auto-deny tracking, download videos, customize websites, keep videos playing in the background, change all instances of "car" to "cat" [1], and a whole bunch of weird stuff that probably shouldn't be included in the browser by default. Just because the browser extension system is broken it doesn't mean that extensions themselves are a problem - if anything, I wish people would install more extensions, not less.
In principle I agree with you, there is just so much crap online that it's tempting to just add this one more extension to fix something.
Looking at my own installed extensions, I have a password manager, Privacy Badger and Firefox Multi-Account Containers, which I suppose is the three I really need. Then I have one that puts the RSS icon back in the address bar, because Mozilla feels that RSS is less important than having the address bar show me special dates, and two that removes very specific things: One for cookie popups and one for removing sign in with Google.
The only one of these I feel should actually be a plugin is my password manager. Privacy management (including cookies), RSS and containers could just be baked into Firefox. All of those seems more relevant to me than AI.
Maybe adding a GreaseMonkey lite could fix the rest of my problem, using code I write and control.