What are add-ons?
Add-ons are small pieces of software that can be used in a browser or other software to enhance or customize the application. Mozilla add-ons are installable enhancements which ease our way of using the browser. Firefox has many add-ons for customization and for security too. There are three major categories of add-ons: Extension, Themes, and Plugins. Extension and themes are distributed from Mozilla repository while plug-ins are available from other site or developers.
What are the uses of Add-ons?
Adding features: they are generally used to add new functions to an application. Functions like RSS readers, FTP, email, proxy-server, VPN, bookmark organizers etc.
Modify how a user views a web-page: many extension can be used to block ads from a site making it less frustrating. Some add-ons like Greasemonkey allows a user to add scripts to target a subset of a webpage.
Interface Changes: some of them can be used to change the interface of a browser. It helps to change the layout color of text etc. some can use themes too to change the overall appearance of the browser.
Privacy and Security: there are plenty of extensions which are really helpful for security and privacy in Mozilla. Extensions like HTTPS everywhere which automatically make websites to use secure HTTPS instead of HTTP. There is some anti-virus extension too which warns users about malicious sites.
Here in this article, I am going to talk about some of the best privacy add-ons to add more security to your browser.
1. HTTPS Everywhere
This addon helps users by automatically making the website to use the more secure HTTPS connection instead HTTP. This was produced as a collaboration between the EFF(Electronic Frontier Foundation) and the Tor Project. With this add-ons, most of the data o request travels through an encrypted protocol. You can also get involve the development of this addons by going through there Github repository here.(https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere/development)
Website: https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
2. Privacy Badger
Privacy Badger stops advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking your moves when you are online. It checks if there request from the external resources when you are visiting a website and any request is found it stops it. It keeps note of the "third party" domains that embed images, scripts and advertising in the pages you visit and if any such domain is found it automatically disallows those contents from loading on a page. But sometimes in some cases, a third-party domain provides some important aspect of a page's functionality, such as images, or stylesheets. In such a cases Privacy Badger allows those connections but will cut out its tracking cookies and referrers.
Google analytics is considered as the first party it and so it will not block any activity by google analytics.
Website: https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
3. uBlock Origin
uBlock Origin is an efficient wide-spectrum blocker which is easy on memory and CPU footprint, and yet can load and enforce thousands of more filters than other popular blockers out there. It has more filter option than other ads blockers. It can read and also helps to create filters from host files.some list that is already loaded and enforced are:- Easylist, Peter Lowe’s server list, Easy privacy and malware domains. Origin also works for other browsers like Chromium, Safari, and Opera. Origin is an open source project and if you want to contribute here is the Github page.(https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/)
4.Cookie AutoDelete
Cookie small files which are stored on a computer. They hold a modest amount of data specific to a particular client and website and can be accessed by the web server or the client computer. With these many hackers or other tracking services can spy on your activities online.
Cookie AutoDelete helps to automatically delete all cookies when they are no longer use by an open tab. Once the session is over it deletes all the information and make you secure from being spied by trackers.
5.Decentraleyes
It emulates content delivery network locally to improve your online privacy. Decentraleyes intercepts traffic and then find supported resources locally and injects them into the environment. All this process happens locally and no configuration is required. It an open-source project and all the information of this addon can be found on their Github page.
6. NoScript Security Suite
NoScript is a very useful and highly customizable plugin which allows you to select the trusted sites where you want to run javascript, flash, and or other plugins. It gives options to whitelist and blacklist site as you want. It offers benefits like: Anti-XSS protection, ClearClick (anti-clickjacking),HTTPS enhancements,Surrogate scripts etc. Though it needs some knowledge to configure it properly and you can check it’s website to know more about it and configure it accordingly.
Website: https://noscript.net/
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