Dark Reader. Pretty sophisticated conversion of webpages into “dark mode” versions. Important if you normally use a computer in light-on-dark mode, else tons of websites will be really obnoxious.
Behind the Overlay. Click the button in the toolbar, and it tries to detect and remove overlays on a webpage. This tends to eliminate a lot of transparent “anti-copy text” efforts, floating dialogs, and all sorts of obnoxious things.
Edit with Emacs. Allows editing text fields in an emacs instance that’s started an edit-server. Updates the text field in the browser on saving or closing the buffer in emacs. Particularly useful for writing long Markdown posts on the Threadiverse in a more-sophisticated editing environment than the little Web UI editor provided by Lemmy…
Fandom Sidebar Remover. Removes the obnoxiously-out-by-default sidebar on fandom.com domains, a popular place to host game wikis.
I still don’t care about cookies. Auto-hides or auto-accepts a number of “are you willing to store cookies” dialogs that some websites add to conform to EU regulations. I am fine with this, since I have a better solution: my browser just wipes cookies on startup. This doesn’t require me clicking on dialogs and doesn’t require me to trust that the remote site is doing anything in response to me clicking buttons.
Privacy Badger. Dynamically detects and blocks cross-domain trackers.
SponsorBlock for YouTube. Identifies and permits skipping ads embedded in YouTube videos, as well as various other tagged sections, like intros, outros, and such.
Stylus. Applies custom CSS to a given domain. Permits users to publish and share them. Useful for the occasional website that has some obnoxious characteristic, like an unwanted sidebar; for popular domains, this not-infrequently has a fix when someone else was annoyed by it.
Greasemonkey. This lets you install small snippets of Javascript to modify webpages on a given domain. Every now and then, it’s the only way to solve some obnoxious irritation with a site. Kind of a heavier-weight solution than Stylus.
Instance Assistant for Lemmy and Kbin. Provides a button to go to a given post on a remote Lemmy/Kbin instance on your own home instance. Helps work around the fact that the Threadiverse has no syntax to link in a home-instance-agnostic-way to a given post, the way it does a community (!community@instance), so links-to-a-post in someone’s comment will typically take you off your home instance. I don’t know how it does the mapping under the covers, but it’s more-sophisticated than just rewriting the domain name, as there’s no static, cross-host path to identify a post with Lemmy’s pathnames. I don’t really know why Lemmy doesn’t use paths of the form “https://lemmy.today/post/lemmy.world/1234” instead of “https://lemmy.today/post/127324”, which I would think would help address this problem…
NoScript. While this isn’t something that I would recommend browsing on-by-default-for-all-domains in 2025 — many years back, when Javascript was less common, it was — I have found that it does a nice job of letting you put the kibosh on some obnoxious features on some webpages that do things like have auto-playing videos pop up, something that “TV station websites” love doing, and otherwise stopping some CPU-hogging pages that you still want to view from doing their CPU-hogging thing.
Vimium C. Provides for keyboard-driven operation, rather than needing to browse with the mouse.
Neither has seen a release in about a year. I believe that at the time I made the call, it was after reading a discussion on Reddit among people who had used them and that Vimium C had better performance than Vimium. I did not spend a lot of time testing each.
Some that I use:
uBlock Origin. A popular ad blocker.
Dark Reader. Pretty sophisticated conversion of webpages into “dark mode” versions. Important if you normally use a computer in light-on-dark mode, else tons of websites will be really obnoxious.
Behind the Overlay. Click the button in the toolbar, and it tries to detect and remove overlays on a webpage. This tends to eliminate a lot of transparent “anti-copy text” efforts, floating dialogs, and all sorts of obnoxious things.
Edit with Emacs. Allows editing text fields in an emacs instance that’s started an edit-server. Updates the text field in the browser on saving or closing the buffer in emacs. Particularly useful for writing long Markdown posts on the Threadiverse in a more-sophisticated editing environment than the little Web UI editor provided by Lemmy…
Fandom Sidebar Remover. Removes the obnoxiously-out-by-default sidebar on fandom.com domains, a popular place to host game wikis.
I still don’t care about cookies. Auto-hides or auto-accepts a number of “are you willing to store cookies” dialogs that some websites add to conform to EU regulations. I am fine with this, since I have a better solution: my browser just wipes cookies on startup. This doesn’t require me clicking on dialogs and doesn’t require me to trust that the remote site is doing anything in response to me clicking buttons.
Privacy Badger. Dynamically detects and blocks cross-domain trackers.
SponsorBlock for YouTube. Identifies and permits skipping ads embedded in YouTube videos, as well as various other tagged sections, like intros, outros, and such.
Stylus. Applies custom CSS to a given domain. Permits users to publish and share them. Useful for the occasional website that has some obnoxious characteristic, like an unwanted sidebar; for popular domains, this not-infrequently has a fix when someone else was annoyed by it.
Greasemonkey. This lets you install small snippets of Javascript to modify webpages on a given domain. Every now and then, it’s the only way to solve some obnoxious irritation with a site. Kind of a heavier-weight solution than Stylus.
Instance Assistant for Lemmy and Kbin. Provides a button to go to a given post on a remote Lemmy/Kbin instance on your own home instance. Helps work around the fact that the Threadiverse has no syntax to link in a home-instance-agnostic-way to a given post, the way it does a community (!community@instance), so links-to-a-post in someone’s comment will typically take you off your home instance. I don’t know how it does the mapping under the covers, but it’s more-sophisticated than just rewriting the domain name, as there’s no static, cross-host path to identify a post with Lemmy’s pathnames. I don’t really know why Lemmy doesn’t use paths of the form “https://lemmy.today/post/lemmy.world/1234” instead of “https://lemmy.today/post/127324”, which I would think would help address this problem…
NoScript. While this isn’t something that I would recommend browsing on-by-default-for-all-domains in 2025 — many years back, when Javascript was less common, it was — I have found that it does a nice job of letting you put the kibosh on some obnoxious features on some webpages that do things like have auto-playing videos pop up, something that “TV station websites” love doing, and otherwise stopping some CPU-hogging pages that you still want to view from doing their CPU-hogging thing.
Vimium C. Provides for keyboard-driven operation, rather than needing to browse with the mouse.
This is very close to by list!
Great list! But why C and not just Vimium, which was more recently updated?
Neither has seen a release in about a year. I believe that at the time I made the call, it was after reading a discussion on Reddit among people who had used them and that Vimium C had better performance than Vimium. I did not spend a lot of time testing each.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Vimium/comments/18v9bnh/what_are_the_advantages_of_vimium_over_vimium_c/
Pretty sure that this wasn’t it, but it does have some discussion.
My own use is pretty basic, as I only use the search and link-following functions.