LibRedirect is pretty great. Everything from reddiot, fandom, youtube, imgur, google maps… (it’s a long list)
has open source or alternatives that you get sent to instead of the big corpo tracking site. I love the fandom, reddit, and youtube redirects, because so many times I end up being linked to those. You can also turn off the redirect per site if you want, so if an invidious link (for example) just refuses to load, you can let youtube track you and see the video.
Essentially lets you keep have browser tabs with entirely separate cookies from each other (like if you opened it in a different browser). Helps me keep work and personal accounts apart, and also sandbox evil^tm^ webpages I’m forced to visit (by giving them their own container).
I almost forget it isn’t included in firefox by default.
Does it have exceptions? I watch Internet Comment Etiquette with Erik; the sponsored segments are usually the highest production value skits and are hilarious as fuck. Wouldn’t want to block the new season of Knobbleberry.
On the desktop browser, SponsorBlock also has a “Whitelist Channel” – it’s near the top of the SponsorBlock popup. Open the popup and you can add any channel you know you want everything from, while silencing the rest. Great add-on, IMO.
Also has categories and options to auto skip or ask you to skip each catagory. A sponser is sponser. You can choose to also skip intros, recaps, end credits, self promotions (buy my shirt), or skip straight to the highlight of the video (great for the tutorial videos that are 5 minute back story and 10 second answer).
Also consider an extension made by the same person, DeArrow. This one crowd sources non click-bait titles and thumbnails (using a screenshot from the video).
Instead of “You won’t belive they are keeping the technology to them selves” with a thumbnail of some dude, mouth wode open, pointing to a flying car next to some celeb.
You’ll see “Bob talks about AI images and his theoriess that aliens are hired by the government to do the ‘Ai’ work.” with a thumbnail showing some random dude streaming.
I thought so too, but then I tried it and I really hated it. If you find yourself getting recommended a bunch of clickbaity videos, then maybe it would be something you’d like, but I tend to block those types of creators so I don’t really see them, so all dearrow ever did for me was make the titles and thumbnails of some of the videos I normally would watch really boring and bland. I trust someone like Tom Scott or Smartereveryday to not use their titles and thumbnails to lie to me to fool me into watching their videos, and since those were the only types of creators that were being affected by dearrow for me, I found it worse when seeing their videos in my recommended list. I personally don’t mind watching a video titled “Why Blue LEDS were really hard to create” instead of seeing something like “This video is about how different colored LEDS were created” with some bland screenshot showing an assembly line of lights or whatever.
It’s not so much in my recommended feed as it is in the “gaming” sub-category. Anything that lets me filter out actual informative videos vs “dude is mad they made the protagonist a black lesbian” would be appreciated. There’s so much of that shit in that category that I can’t possibly filter it all by disliking a few videos or even blocking a few channels.
It would also just be funny to see all the “Can you beat X using just Y?” Have the addendum: “Yes.” Added to the title.
Surprised nobody already suggested some kind of mouse gestures extension. I use foxy gestures and once you learn a few gestures (starting with closing a tab and undoing it) it becomes hard to live without it! Gesturefy is also a popular alternative.
Genuine question: How are gestures faster / more efficient than clicking a button, or using keyboard hotkeys? Or is this mainly for notebooks, tablets and smartphones?
Compared to clicking a button I would say a lot faster as you don’t have to move your mouse to start initiating your gestures. It’s maybe more marginal compared to a short key. Still your hand is already on the mouse ready to execute a gesture. Personally I find it really convenient and for me it’s the second most useful add-on after ublock. When using a browser on other computers that don’t have these I find it really tedious and I am shocked at how much ad there is.
Firefox supports this natively. Under “Settings > Privacy and Security > Cookies and Site Data” set the “Delete site data when Firefox is closed” checkbox, and use the “Manage Exceptions” button to add websites you want to allow.
I still like my NoScript, sometimes I just take it as an indicator of who makes shitty sites.
If I end up on a site that’s completely blank and it isn’t important for me to interact with it, Ieave.
Surprisingly even news sites often load better than most others with NoScript disabling everything on them, I guess at the end of the day they still really need people to read them otherwise they’d become completely irrelevant?
I’ve seen complaints (Reddit I think?)that it just makes it cumbersome to do stuff when there are cascading lists of domain opening as you enable one, but if you’re the kind of person that permanently whitelists all of them at that point, I don’t think any amount of add-ons are going to save you, but I do like puzzles so I don’t mind figuring out what needs to be toggled for site to work.
The big downside is making payments on sites with silly amounts of 3rd parties involved (Im looking at you Costco), but it’s a bit better than it used to be when there was concern about getting charged twice, now it’s more like…don’t get charged and wonder why they didn’t process your payment.
Edit: is it NoScript or ublockorigin that blocks ads on prime video? It’s one or the other which is nice if you’re watching something on pc rather than TV, I guess I should test.
The big downside is making payments on sites with silly amounts of 3rd parties involved
As a user of NoScript for many years, the easiest way to deal with this for me is to do my payments from a second browser. I have found LibreWolf to be really good as far as not blocking what it takes to do such a transaction but still blocking everything else very well.
I don’t like to use NoScript under purchasing/payment circumstances; multiple sites are often involved in payment processing and it’s too easy to break what I didn’t know was there under my usually very strict rules.
Sure, I could just turn off NoScript for a site I want to do a financial transaction on, but instead of dicking around with it anymore I just use a different browser because the upsides are so good.
Like online shopping: I shop on one browser, and login and pay on another, which also allows me to strip any unwanted affiliate links and tracking information from the URL when I do purchase something. I also get to see price differences between anonymous and logged in users, which is another game online retailers like to pay: logged off there is a low bait price, and logged in switches you to a higher price (Amazon does this by changing the recommended seller of an item; I just log in on the second browser and change it back, lol).
Any different browser with NoScript turned off and secondary blocking (uBlockOrigin, uMatrix, etc) enabled will serve the purpose, if you’re not interested in a puzzle one day.
Thanks for the info, I definitely have to consider an alternative like that in the future.
For the time being I tend to just enable 1 domain at a time temporarily and see if shit works, if it doesn’t, disable it again. It works ok, as I’ve gotten used to seeing a specific few domains or commonalities between the payment type ones. But yeah probably similar to you I keep very few things allowed by default globally and have even begun reducing them lately.
If it’s a really big hassle atm I’ll revert to chrome (didn’t have to yet) since those fuckers already have my card details anyway, but luckily I don’t really do all that much shopping online so not a huge issue…the most common thing I do is top up my travel card for local transport and I use it like once a month, so that probably tells you a lot.
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