I don’t know man. If I swim in the ocean, I get wet, but I still wouldn’t say I’m taking any of the ocean with me as I come out of it.
By the same logic, I’d say I’m not “saving” anything although yes I do understand at all times I will have some gigs of “the internet” on my local machine.
Not quite sure that example tracks. I’d say it’s more like you went food shopping yesterday and still have stuff leftover in the fridge today. Sure it might not be as fresh as when you got it from the store, but it’s still completely edible.
I disagree with your assessment. To an average user, whatever winds up saved in their browser cache is there mostly unintentionally. Yes, it’s saving info from sites they choose to visit, but after that initial choice, the user is out of the loop. The browser saves what it needs to without user notification or input. I might even wager that most users are unaware of their browser cache, or don’t know what’s in it or how to access it. Therefore, I believe your metaphor perhaps confers too active a decision-making process on something that most people are completely unconscious of.
To be clear, the strawman average user I’m using here is me. I know I have a browser cache, I know vaguely what is stored in it and why, and I know how to clear it if I’m having certain issues. That’s about it. I sure as heck don’t treat it as an archive.
I haven’t seen these mentioned but they are kinda niche though. I use them for work more than personal usecase but maybe someone else finds them useful.
Copy on select - highlighted text is automatically copied
Snap links - open multiple links or check several boxes using a click-drag interface
No Script - Yes, I run both UBO and NoScript, they have slightly different use cases
Dark Reader
FireFox Multi-Account Containers
Redirector - Great for automagically changing links
KeePassXC-Browser - For password manager integration
Rested - For monkeying with REST APIs
User-Agent Switcher and Manager - Why yes, I am the browser you are looking for
Video DownloadHelper - Because sometimes, you need stuff available offline
In terms of actually recommending extensions to others. I’d recommend most of the above, excepting NoScript. If you are using UBO, then the use case for NoScript is a very narrow one where you want selective whitelisting of javascript while visiting a site. UBO’s blacklisting approach works for most cases and UBO’s whitelisting feature is lacking the granularity of NoScript.
Multi-account containers is one of my favorite things about Firefox. I use Temporary Containertabs too, so anything not in an explicit container is in a brand new one of its own.
I use Dark Reader on my work laptop was well. We had a conference call with a vendor and I was sharing my screen while talking with their team about our usage of their product and one of them stopped me and asked about the UI looking strange. I said, “oh ya, I use Dark Reader because you don’t have a native dark mode. You do lose points for that.” They had a native dark mode a couple months later.
I’ve come to the conclusion that UI designers hate their customers’ retinas.
Wayback Machine and also archive.is’s addons. I archive webpages frequently so they’re super helpful. And if a webpage has been taken down you can easily go to an archived version with the Wayback addon.
Also, Vimium C. Not for everyone and definitely down to personal preference rather than “I recommend this to everyone”, but I’d struggle to browse the web comfortably without it.
I’m surprised I haven’t seen any recommendations for “Indie Wiki Redirect” as Fandom (the wiki site, common for games) has started shoving ads down users throats, so wiki maintainers are moving to other sites like wiki.gg, but search engines still show Fandom as the first result.
Don’t know if the other browsers have it, but I use Marker by robin-rpr on Firefox desktop. Simple Enough extension for being able to draw/annotate/highlight on browser screen. Was doing some college work in class and wanted to be able to quickly write out and convert binary. Helped so much to be able to do it in browser so I could easily see the numbers.
Though, it was last updated October 22, 2022, so keep that in mind if you’re like me and don’t always like using software that’s more than a few years old (games not included). The alternative I saw (Web Marker by SFer) is under an “All Rights Reserved” license, but was updated last month (June 8th), so pick your poison.
Not really, uBO blocks some known stuff like cookie notices while Kill Sticky removes every fixed element on a webpage. It’s actually more similar to Reader View.
Imagus feels like in an alternate universe it could be default browser behavior. When you hover over an image it will expand to full resolution and then you can press buttons to open in new tab, download, zoom in, etc.
Works on pretty much any website and is nice if the website has sized the images too small or if your eyesight is less than great.