Categories: webextensions

Privacy Features, Tab Tools & Other New WebExtensions

Tabzen is great for tab hoarders.

As of late March, addons.mozilla.org (AMO) has around 2,000 listed add-ons built with WebExtensions APIs, the new cross-browser standard for writing add-ons. Average daily installs for them total more than 5,000,000. That’s nice momentum as we hurtle towards the Firefox 57 release.

Volume aside, I continue to be impressed with the quality of content emerging…

Smart HTTPS (revived) is the WebExtensions version of one of my favorite yet simple security add-ons—it changes HTTP addresses to the secure HTTPS. Disconnect for Facebook (WebExtension) is another fine privacy tool that prevents Facebook from tracking your Web movement by blocking all Facebook related requests sent between third-party sites.

While we’re talking Facebook, you know what annoys me? Facebook’s “suggested posts” (for some reason I get served a lot of “suggested” content that implies I may have a fatty liver). Kick Facebook Suggested Posts puts an end to that nonsense.

History Cleaner conveniently wipes away your browsing history after a set amount of time, while History Zebra features white and black lists to manage specific sites you want to appear (or not) in your browsing history.

Tab Auto Refresh lets you set timed refresh intervals per tab.

Don’t Touch My Tabs! protects against hyperlinks that try to hijack your previous tab. In other words, when you typically click a link, it grants the new page control over the one you clicked from, which is maybe not-so awesome for a number of reasons, like reloading the page with intrusive ads, or hackers throwing up a fake login to phish your info.

Speaking of tabs, I dig Tab Auto Refresh because I follow a couple of breaking news sites, so with this add-on I set certain tabs to refresh at specific time intervals, then I just click over every so often to catch the latest.

Tabzen is another dynamic tab tool that treats tab management in a familiar bookmarking fashion.

Turn any Reddit page into literally the darkest corner of the Web with dark page themer Reddit Slate Night 2.0 (while we’re on the Reddit tip, this comment collapser presents a compelling alternate layout for perusing conversations).

Dark Mode turns the entire internet goth.

Link Cleaner removes extraneous guck from your URLs, including tracking parameters from commerce sites Amazon and AliExpress.

These are awesome add-ons from very creative developers! It’s great to see such diverse, interesting WebExtensions crop up.

If you’re a developer of a legacy add-on or Chrome extension and want more info about the WebExtensions porting process, this should help. Or if you’re interested in writing a WebExtension from scratch, check this out.

5 comments on “Privacy Features, Tab Tools & Other New WebExtensions”

  1. jjjibbberjjjabbber wrote on

    How is Smart HTTPS any better/worse than HTTPS Everywhere? I find your lack of information on these extensions very disturbing.

    1. Scott DeVaney wrote on

      HTTPS Everywhere isn’t a WebExtension. This entire post is about WebExtensions.

      1. Harry Lasagna wrote on

        > HTTPS Everywhere is already migrated to WebExtensions, this is what the Chromium version of the extension runs. We maintain a codebase for this and will be moving to this for Firefox with the deprecation of XPCOM.

        > https://github.com/EFForg/https-everywhere/issues/7389

  2. Katorg wrote on

    We are waiting for review almost 3 weeks and we are still on 77 place.

    https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/katorg-katcart/

  3. Emanuele wrote on

    Extensions like “Tab Auto Refresh” shouldn’t even exist at all … soon or later we will have extensions even for the “back” button