Brief: In this guide, we take a look at the 32 most used Firefox add-ons to enhance your productivity in Linux desktops.
Despite having lost its market share and popularity over the years to other web browsers such as Google Chrome and Safari, Firefox still enjoys significant patronage from users who use it for one reason or another.
And just like other browsers, Firefox provides a rich set of add-ons or extensions, which provides added functionality to make browsing the web much more fun, faster, and safer.
The add-ons can be classified into various categories such as language & support, search tools, appearance, alerts & updates, and so on.
1. LeechBlock NG
Do you find yourself succumbing to the temptation of visiting websites that take away your productive hours while at work? If your answer to this question is yes, then, do not hesitate to install the LeechBlockNG extension, which is a simple productivity tool designed to block all those sites that rob you of your previous hours.
Leechblock lets you specify up to 30 websites to block and when to block them. It allows granular control which allows you to specify the duration with which to block a site (e.g. between 8:00 am and 3:00 pm) after a specific time limit (e.g, after 1 hour) or a combination of the two (e.g. allow a site every 30 minutes between 8:00 am and 3:00 pm).
2. Adblock Plus
Browser popups are often annoying as they usually clutter your browser and distract you from your work. Adblock Plus is a popular and widely-used ad blocker that you can install to block annoying ads and provide a smooth browsing experience.
3. Tomato Clock
Let’s face it, everyone has a limited concentration span. It’s shorter if you have a propensity of checking out your social media handles every so often within your working hours.
Tomato Clock is a handy and effective time management Add-on that helps you break your work sessions into manageable time chunks known as ‘tomatoes’. By default, it lets you break down your sessions into 25-minute ‘tomato’ time intervals separated by short time breaks.
Everything is customizable, from the work sessions to the time breaks which vary from one user to another. The Tomato timer notifies you when it’s break time so that you can take a few minutes off and blow away some stream.
The tomato clock leverages the default browser notification system which is accompanied by sound to notify you when it’s time to take a break.
4. LastPass Password Manager
LastPass Password Manager is yet another add-on that lets you efficiently and securely store and manage your passwords. It is an award-winning password manager that is currently ranked among the best password managers in 2023.
LastPass stores your passwords inside a virtual vault on the cloud using 2-factor authentication on iron-clad and highly encrypted servers. In addition, it is multi-platform and you can store and access your passwords across multiple devices.
5. OneTab
Are you in a habit of opening too many tabs which end up hogging your memory? With OneTab, you can easily convert tabs to a list. When you need to access your tabs again, you can seamlessly restore them individually or all of them collectively at once.
With the tabs in one tab list, there is less memory and CPU utilization and, hence, better system performance. Additional benefits of using OneTab include privacy and assurance – Your tabs’ information is never disclosed to any parties including OneTab developers.
6. To Google Translate
As the name implies, the To Google Translate add-on helps in the translation of text from one language to another. It sends selected text to Google Translate for translation to your preferred language. You can easily configure the default languages that require translation on the options page.
7. Grammar and Spell Checker – LanguageTool
As you might have guessed right, the Grammar and Spell Checker add-on checks your text for grammar issues and spelling errors. The goal of this plugin is to ensure that your writing is error-free.
8. Autofill
If you are in the habit of frequently filling out forms, then the AutoFill add-on will come in handy. Autofill, as the name suggests, focuses on automatically filling out forms without any user interaction.
All you need to do is simply provide your preferred details and Autofill will detect any forms on the browser and fill them out. It goes without saying that this boosts your productivity by saving you lots of time.
AutoFill makes use of powerful text-matching patterns to identify fields to autofill. It auto-fills all field types including text, numbers, password, time, range, and many more. What’s more, is that it automatically saves text fields in case your web browser crashes or your PC shuts down unexpectedly.
9. Todoist for Firefox
It’s easy to get swamped and overwhelmed when you have multiple tasks at hand. Todoist add-on is a useful to-do tool that allows you to efficiently plan out your day.
It lets you prioritize tasks, tracks your progress, and helps you keep abreast with impending deadlines. Once you have executed your tasks, you can simply check them off without switching contexts.
10. Toggl Track: Productivity & Time Tracker
Toggl Track is a powerful little add-on that accelerates your productivity. It’s a simple online timer that tracks the amount of time you spend on a browser.
You can use Toggl Track on the web, as a desktop widget, and even on your smartphone device. All your data gets synced in real time.
The goal of Toggl Track is to see how much time is spent on various tasks so that you can keep tabs on what activities are sucking your productive hours. This allows you to make amends and maximize your time on tasks that really matter.
What’s more, is that Toggl Track enjoys integration with over 90+ different tools including Google Drive, Asana, GitHub, Slack, Jira, and Redmine to mention a few.
11. Disconnect
If privacy is a top-of-mind agenda, then Disconnect is the go-to open-source privacy add-on that comes with a subscription that allows you to pay for what you want.
It safeguards your privacy by preventing third-party apps from tracking your online activity. In addition, you can set it up to display blocking information that shows the sites trying to track your browsing history.
12. FireShot
FireShot is an extension tailored specifically to take full web page screenshots. You can easily capture screenshots and save the image, send it to the clipboard, and upload or email it.
In addition, the extension provides you the ability to crop and resize the screenshots as well as create PDFs from the images. You can also annotate the screenshot with text, shapes, and even icons and arrows.
13. Dark Reader
Do you squint or strain your eyes as you stare at your monitor? This no longer needs to be the case if the site you are visiting does not have the option to turn on dark mode.
The Dark Reader Firefox extension comes in handy by turning on dark mode for any site that you visit. This makes it a whole lot easier for your eyes. In addition, it also allows you to adjust the brightness, sepia filter and so much more.
14. Ublock-Origin AdBlocker
Ublock-Origin is not just your ordinary ad blocker. It is a resource-friendly wide-spectrum content blocker that blocks popups, coin miners, and trackers using a set of preset filters. Doing so ensures your online privacy.
Moreover, you can boost your online activity performance by setting rules to block JavaScript locally or globally – although this might have the undesired consequence of interfering with sites powered by JavaScript.
15. Grammarly: Grammar Checker and Writing App
Grammarly is a hugely popular all-in-one tool that provides spell-checking, grammar, and punctuation-checking capabilities as you work on an online document or type inside a text field. It offers real-time suggestions for enhancing the tone and clarity of your text with the aim of ensuring that your writing makes the right impression.
The Grammarly browser extension improves your writing by analyzing your sentences as you write and applying color-coded underlines to words or sentences that need improvement. You can hover your mouse on the underline to see the suggestions provided to edit the text with just a single click.
Grammarly not only detects incorrectly spelled words but also flags words used in the wrong context, for example, “advice” and “advise“. In addition, it offers suggestions for rewriting sentences in a more coherent manner.
16. Enhancer for YouTube [Temporarily Stopped]
If you are looking to enhance your YouTube user experience, consider installing Enhancer for the YouTube Firefox extension, which provides a range of nifty extra features to help you get the most out of YouTube.
For example, you can manage YouTube ads, control volume using the mouse wheel, configure dozens of keyboard shortcuts to control YouTube and so much more.
17. Privacy Badger
Privacy Badger is an add-on that automatically blocks invisible trackers. It does this by auto-discovering trackers based on their behavior and smartly sending a “do not track” signal along with your browsing activity.
Aside from automatic tracker blocking, it removes outgoing link tracking on Google and Facebook with additional privacy safeguards.
18. DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials
DuckDuckGo is a popular privacy-focused internet search engine that is an alternative to Google Search. Apart from being a search engine, it also offers a mobile browser app for both iOS and Android as well as a browser extension that can be installed on both Google Chrome and Firefox.
The DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials browser extension guarantees to keep your online searches as anonymous and private as possible. Along with this, it also provides a built-in tracker-blocking feature to keep away sites that would want to collect information from your online activity.
Feature highlights:
- Offers private online searches out of the box.
- Stops 3rd-party scripts and trackers from loading and collecting your data.
- Blocks tracking cookies from tracking you as you visit various sites.
- Stops companies from collecting browsing history and other personal information.
19. SponsorBlock
SponsorBlock is a Firefox extension that lets you skip undesirable parts of a YouTube video including intros, outros, sponsors, subscription reminders, and other undesirable content.
SponsorBlock is crowdsourced and thus, allows users to submit the start and end times of sponsored segments in YouTube videos. Once such information is submitted, users with the same extension on their browsers will skip other sponsored content.
20. Awesome Emoji Picker
Emojis add spice to conversations. They emphasize emotions and make conversations much more lively. Nowadays almost all chat applications come bundled with emojis.
The Awesome Emojis Picker is a Firefox extension that bundles a wide assortment of emojis that you can pick and insert on almost any webpage including your favorite chat applications such as Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and even emails.
Be advised that this extension works with Firefox v63 or higher.
21. ClearURLs
Many websites, especially eCommerce sites, use tracking elements in URLs to track user location and online activity. The ClearURLs extension is a Firefox extension that safeguards your privacy by automatically detecting and removing tracking elements from URLs.
The extension is fully open source, and thus, everyone can join the project and contribute to the code. It uses over 250 rules for tracking parameters to remove tracking elements from URLs.
In summary, it does the following
- Removes tracking elements from URLs.
- Cleans up multiple URLs at once.
- Blocks tracking injection over history API.
- Prevents ETag tracking.
- Supports redirection to the destination, without tracking services as middlemen.
22. Search by Image
Search by Image is an open-source and powerful reverse search tool that makes the reverse search for images an effortless endeavor. It supports a wide selection of over 30 search engines including Google, Bing, Yandex, TinEye, and even Shutterstock to mention a few.
Search by Image extension is used to verify the authenticity of images and also helps in flagging down false information on social media. The extension can search for images from the context menu and browser toolbar aided by a comprehensive set of reverse image search engines.
In addition, it supports searching images from your PC, or smartphone, images from private sites, and captured areas.
In a nutshell, it provides the following search modes:
- Select URL – This is the default search mode. It allows you to select an image from a webpage and search using the image URL.
- Select Image – This allows you to select an image from a webpage and later search for it using the image file. Suitable for sites that do not allow direct linking of images. Especially private sites.
- Capture – Searches within a captured area of the webpage.
- Browse – Searches with an image from your device. It also supports the pasting of images from a clipboard for desktop platforms.
- URL – Searches with an image URL.
23. NoScript Security Suite
NoScript Security Suite is a free extension for Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and other browsers that preemptively block malicious web content. Further, it only allows JavaScript and other potentially harmful scrips to be executed only on trusted websites of your preference.
The extension protects against Clickjacking attempts, cross-site scripting attacks (XSS), and cross-zone DNS rebinding / CSRF attacks (router hacking). Its preemptive approach towards tackling malicious scripts ensures that you are away from harm’s way.
24. Disable JavaScript
As the name suggests, the Disable Javascript extension disables JavaScript only for specific sites and tabs. It gives the user the autonomy to decide if JavaScript should be enabled or disabled for a given host or a given tab.
It provides the following features:
- Sets the default state of Javascript (JS on or JS off).
- Sets the disable behavior (either by domain or tabs).
- Uses a context menu item for toggling that can also be disabled.
- Uses shortcuts by default – which can also be disabled.
- Allows you to view blacklisted/whitelisted domains.
- Adds base domains that automatically enable/disable JS for subdomains.
25. Block Site
BlockSite – Website Blocker is a cross-browser, website/URL blocker that enables you to block websites for a certain period of time, hence, allowing you to manage distractions that would impact your productivity.
You can block individual domains/sites, redirect a blocked domain to a different destination, auto-close blocked tabs and so much more.
In summary, the extension does the following
- Blocks unwanted websites or domains.
- Provides time and date-based blocking.
- Use wildcard matching or regular expression matching to prevent access to a range of websites.
- Display custom messages on blocked pages.
- Auto-closes blocked tabs after a certain period of time.
- Closes irritating pop-ups as soon as the opening request is received.
26. Vimium-FF
Vimium-FF is a cross-browser extension that provides keyboard shortcuts for navigation and control in the spirit of the Vim editor.
It allows you to navigate the web without using the mouse and provides a wide array of customizable keyboard shortcuts, employs a clever highlighting method to navigate using links, and provides an in-page help dialog to help you keep track of your personalized shortcuts.
27. Flagfox
Flagfox is a nifty extension that displays a country’s flag icon at the far right of the URL bar indicating the current location of the webserver. In addition, it provides valuable information such as the IP address, ISP, longitude, and latitude of the webserver, etc.
The extension is simple and unobtrusive and allows you to stay informed about the webserver location and other important metrics relating to the server.
28. Bitwarden
Bitwarden is a highly-rated password manager that continues to receive accolades in the global community. It’s a free, open-source, and secure password manager that offers an easy and secure way to store your logins and passwords.
It works across all your devices: from mobile to desktop. You can share sensitive data within your vault from any browser and sync it with your devices. In doing so, it makes it easy to manage, store, and secure unlimited passwords from anywhere.
Bitwarden employs end-to-end 256-bit AES encryption to ensure that your confidential data always stays safe and private. Bitwarden also provides a built-in password generator for generating robust and unique passwords to meet the laid-out password strength requirements.
29. YouTube High Definition
YouTube High Definition is a cool extension that addresses a few issues about your experience in watching video YouTube videos. For a start, it automatically plays all YouTube videos in the highest possible resolution.
In addition, it lets you adjust the video player size as well as the volume level for all videos. To add on that, it supports High-definition play for embedded videos on social sites such as Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and many others.
The goal of the extension is to improve your video-watching experience by ensuring you get the best video quality.
30. TWP – Translate Web Pages
Translate Web Pages extension translates your webpage in real-time. You don’t need to open new tabs.
In a nutshell, this is what the extension does.
- It translates your current webpage without having to open new tabs.
- It lets you select the translation language.
- You can set the extension to automatically translate.
31. Firefox Multi-account Containers
Firefox Multi-account Containers is a handy extension that lets you separate different browsing behaviors to keep trackers at bay and enhance privacy.
With the extension added to your browser, you can easily separate your work and personal browsing. This implies that you can draw a boundary between your work and private life and stop websites from tracking your online activity.
Containers work by compartmentalizing site data into site-specific containers. This ensures that sites contained in a container cannot communicate with other container tabs, and thus, your data cannot be shared with other websites.
32. Dictionary Anywhere
Dictionary Anywhere is an extension that enables you to view the definition of a word. All you need is to simply double-click on a word and its definition will be displayed in a simple pop-up bubble.
This extension supports English, Spanish, German, and French.
In this guide, we have looked at some of the most widely used add-ons that you can use on the Firefox browser to boost your productivity in Linux systems. This is by no means a complete list of all the productivity add-ons, there are still many more that you can try out.
Do you know of any other best firefox addon or extension for improving productivity in Linux? Let us know your views in the comments below.
