Browser of Choice

I’ve been heavily into tech since I was a little kid running “wolf3d.exe” from MS-DOS, using AOL as my ISP, and having a CompuServe mailbox for a while. I guarantee that there are still old websites I’ve made still floating around the web, old accounts I’ve forgotten about as well still “out there”. But one thing that I’ve changed my opinion on over the years has been my web browser of choice.

Back in the day, I used Internet Explorer because I didn’t know any better on Windows 95/98/XP, but I quickly found Firefox and it’s been my primary web browser for mostly the last 20+ years. Sure, I’ve spent some time with Chrome when it first came out (it was pretty revolutionary IMO at the time) and I probably forgot all about Firefox, however I’m sure I didn’t use it for long. Firefox caught up over the years and has proven to be an awesome browser.

I actually spent the last month test driving Vivaldi as my primary browser, and while it was a great experience, it was honestly overkill for what I needed. Then there is the fact that it is Chromium based, just like everything else. It’s not that I’m so anti-Google that I don’t want to use Chromium based browsers, but when everything is the same under the hood, then why bother using it at all? I thought it was overkill with all the baked in stuff that I just don’t use, like the built in mail client, floating tabs, sidebars, etc. I just need a simple web browser that has a few extensions and that’s it, no extra bells and whistles.

So what extensions do I use with Firefox?

• uBlock Origin - Ad-blocking, a must in these days
• Dark Reader - The web can be a bit too bright and hurt my eyes
• SponsorBlock - I don’t care who sponsors your videos
• TorrentControl - Makes adding torrents to my qBit container much easier
• SingleFile - One click to convert the current webpage into a PDF
• Keepa - Amazon price checking
• MeTube - Sends a YouTube video over to MeTube for archiving and converting
• Dictionary Anywhere - I can highlight any word and get an instant definition
• Old Reddit Redirect - The new Reddit layout is trash
• Reddit Enhancement Suite - Awesome Reddit tools, specifically word and subreddit filters

Sure, this list looks a little much since I said that I didn’t need the overkill stuff in Vivaldi, however, these are extensions that I actually use daily. And Firefox just works. It’s fast and reliable, does exactly what I need it to do.

I really hope that the Firefox crew will keep doing a great job and won’t crumble to the pressures of greed like many other companies and projects have. The day that Firefox goes away and Chromium is the standard, the day I stop using the web altogether.

This is day 11 of #100DaysToOffload.