Extensions have long been at the heart of the Firefox — providing users with powerful options to personalize their browsing experience. Nearly half of all Firefox users have installed at least one extension. These incredible tools and features are built by a community of more than 10,000 developers. While all developers contribute to the depth and diversity of our ecosystem, some of the most popular extensions provide significant global impact.
Today we celebrate our first cohort of notable developers. Below are this year’s recipients of the Firefox Extension Developer Award, presented to developers of some of the most popular Firefox extensions. The bespoke metal trophies were designed by Alper Böler, a California-based industrial designer and artist.
On behalf of Mozilla, and all Firefox users, thank you to all developers for your amazing contributions to the ecosystem!
Platinum
uBlock Origin — Ad blocker with 10M+ users. uBlock Origin has long been one of the most popular extensions for Firefox, providing a massive positive impact for users. This is a well-supported extension maintained by a passionate group of contributors, and we’d like to extend a special thank you to everyone who helps make this an exceptional extension.
(Reflecting astounding recent growth, uBlock Origin averaged 9.5M daily users when the awards were commissioned, which would have made it a Gold Award recipient; however it has since surpassed 10.5M daily users so we’ve elevated uBlock Origin to Platinum status.)
Silver
Ablock Plus — Debuted on Firefox all the way back in 2006.
Video DownloadHelper — Immensely capable media downloader.
Privacy Badger — “Privacy Badger is developed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit with a 35-year history of defending online privacy. We created Privacy Badger over a decade ago to fight pervasive, nonconsensual tracking online. In the absence of strong privacy laws, surveillance has become the business model of the internet. Just browsing the web can expose sensitive data to advertisers, Big Tech companies, and data brokers. While we continue advocating for comprehensive privacy legislation, Privacy Badger gives people a quick, easy way to protect themselves. Privacy Badger is both a practical tool for individuals and part of EFF’s broader effort to end online surveillance for everyone.” – Lena Cohen, Staff Technologist at EFF
AdBlocker Ultimate — Also works beautifully on Firefox for Android.
AdGuard AdBlocker — Blocks ads and will also warn you about potentially malicious websites.
Dark Reader — “Working long hours in front of a bright computer screen made my eyes tired. LCD screens can feel like staring into a light bulb. Dark Reader started as a simple screen inverter to give my eyes a break. Over time, it evolved into a much more sophisticated tool, adapting to the growing needs of users.” – Alexander Shutau
AdBlock for Firefox — Arrived to the Firefox ecosystem in 2014.
DuckDuckGo Search & Tracker Protection — “At DuckDuckGo, we want to help people take back control of their personal information — whether that be when they’re making a search, using AI, emailing, or browsing. In 2017, we had a search engine, but we knew we wanted to extend privacy to the browsing experience. At that time we hadn’t built our own browser, so we bundled private search, tracking and fingerprinting protections, and more, into an easy-to-add web extension.” – Sam Macbeth
Bronze
Ghostery — “We wanted to create a truly user-focused ad blocker — one that doesn’t compromise on effectiveness, doesn’t maintain whitelists for advertisers, and gives people back control of their browsing experience. Many tools in the market were tied to ad industry interests, so our goal was to build a 100% independent, transparent solution. Ghostery was one of the first add-ons ever published on the Mozilla platform. Its original motivation was to bring transparency to the web.” – Krzysztof Modras
Return YouTube Dislike — “(I made it) for my own convenience. I wanted to use this feature myself, first and foremost. I think YouTube misses a lot by making dislike counts invisible.” – Dmitry Selivanov
Translate Web Pages — An effectively simple translation tool.
Bitwarden — “Back in 2015-’16, I was frustrated with the existing password management landscape. As a developer and engineer, I saw several problems that needed solving: complicated setup procedures, lack of cross-platform availability, and fragmented open source solutions that were hard to trust. I wanted to create a password manager that would meet the needs of someone like myself — a technologist who valued simplicity, transparency, and accessibility. The browser extension was one of the first components I built and it turned out to be crucial for Bitwarden since it made password management seamless for users across their daily web browsing.” – Kyle Spearrin
To Google Translate — “When I was at university, I started learning English on my own. I used to read articles in English about security and programming, and whenever I didn’t understand a word or was unsure about its pronunciation, I would copy and paste it into Google Translate to learn its meaning and how to say it. Over time, I realized this process was very manual and time-consuming, since I still had a lot of vocabulary to learn. That’s when I thought: ‘Is it possible to automate this to make it easier?’ That insight led me to build an add-on. In short, it started as a personal need, and later I realized that many others shared the same challenge. I never imagined the extension would reach and help so many people.” – Juan Escobar
IDM Integration Module — Companion extension to the popular desktop application.
Tampermonkey — “In 2008 I teamed up with a friend to develop a Greasemonkey userscript that automated parts of an online game. The script eventually grew into a full‑featured Firefox extension. When Chrome was released, I ported the extension to that browser and realized that the insights I gained about the WebExtension APIs could serve as the foundation for a new userscript manager. I later launched that manager, Tampermonkey, in May 2010. Firefox’s switch to WebExtensions in 2015 gave me an opportunity to bring Tampermonkey to Firefox as well.” – Jan Biniok
Grammarly: AI Writing and Grammar Checker — “When we first launched Grammarly, it was exclusively in our Grammarly editor, so users had to write directly into our web editor to get help with their writing. We realized there was so much more value in bringing Grammarly directly to where people write — in their browsers, on the sites they use every day for work and for school, and across 500,000 different apps and websites. Extensions became the natural way to meet people in their existing workflows rather than asking them to change how they already work, and it’s part of what makes Grammarly one of the top AI tools.” – Iryna Shamrai
Cisco Webex Extension — Companion extension for Cisco Webex Meetings or Webex App.
SponsorBlock – Skip Sponsorships on YouTube — “One of my favourite YouTube channels uploaded a video with a sponsor message that was deceptively placed into the video. It really made me frustrated. Then I had the idea that crowdsourcing sponsor timestamps could maybe just work.” – Ajay
ClearURLs — “The idea for the extension actually came up quite spontaneously during a lunch break at university. While studying computer science, a friend and I started talking about how frustrating all those tracking elements in URLs can be. We wondered if there was already a browser add-on that could automatically clean them up, but after some research we realized there really wasn’t anything like that out there.” – Kevin Röbert
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