Linked List: Three Firefox Add-ons for Power Users

A browser is a sandboxed area where you can access, view, and manipulate the data. Somehow the ability to manipulate the data (website) locally; to suit users' needs doesn't get noticed much. This feature is a potent tool in the hands of capable users. The following add-ons will add to that users' power.

Redirector

Redirector is a browser add-on for Firefox, Chrome, Edge and Opera. The add-on lets you create redirects for specific webpages, e.g. always redirect http://bing.com to http://google.com. It was originally done by request for someone on the Mozillazine forums. The redirect patterns can be specified using regular expressions or simple wildcards and the resulting url can use substitutions based on captures from the original url. The add-on can for example be used to redirect a site to its https version, redirect news paper articles to their print versions, redirect pages to use specific proxy servers and more.

Redirector Manual

This a FOSS Firefox add-on. It's also available for other browser platforms. It's easy to set up the forward/redirect rules. They all are stored locally. You can also export/import the rules.

Example use: I use it as a client-side short URL host. For example, http://g.t goes my currently working GitLab project. I have many shortcuts like that.

You can also add other rules, for example, any request to bing, forward it to duckduckgo.

Greasemonkey

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to customize the way webpages look and function.

Greasemonkey

Greasemonkey is a FOSS Firefox add-on. Once installed, you can write scripts in JavaScript to modify any website that you visit. Make it look and behave the way you want. There is also script (called user scripts) hosts who host the scripts. You can download and install them into your Greasemonkey to use it. You can also further edit them to customize if required.

Example use: Make any DOI link, link to sci-hub. This user-script is helpful for any user who reads a lot. Make any selected text along with the URL sent to an API endpoint for archiving. There are so many use-cases; your imagination is the limit.

Dark Reader

Dark Reader is an open-source MIT-licensed browser extension, that is designed to analyzes web pages. Based on its analysis Dark Reader will generate a dark mode based on this. Hereby Dark Reader aims to reduce the eyestrain of the user. Dark Reader is feature-rich and can be configured in many ways throughout the UI.

Dark Reader

Dark Reader is a FOSS Firefox add-on. It's also available for other browsers. It's a must-have add-on if you are a dark mode fan, as many websites don't support dark mode.