Browser Add-ons That Should Come Standard, But Don’t
What if car companies didn’t care about windshield wipers? What if car seats sucked? What if all they were concerned about was getting from point A to Point B? Well, they’d be browser companies. Chrome, Firefox, Opera, the other one I won;t mention, these all ship in an incomplete state. Often without ad blockers, content filters, or privacy protection. There are plenty of “Must-Have” browser extension lists around. This is a “why the hell didn’t it already have this” list.
Terms of Service: Didn’t read is an ad on that will summarize any terms of service that stands between you and your software. We all know you are a liar. Apple knows, Microsoft too, which is why
they troll users by adding absurd clauses into the TOS. Best of all, it summarizes the nastiness of the privacy terms with a simple rating system. The only alternative to this is reading over twenty pages of text, and ain’t nobody got time for that. Besides, most of these contracts (that’s what these are: contracts) are written in legalize, so a layman’s glance on them is not going to bestow the kind the kind of understanding you need to deal with the liabilities involved.
Ad Block. Essential to enjoy the web anymore. It didn’t have to be this way., if websites site operators had simply not made ads loud, invasive, privacy destroying and obnoxious, no one would really care about blocking ads, much less all of them. Yet greed, and a casual contempt for their own readers has caused users to cast blanket judgment on the internet and find them wanting. So long ad supported websites. Hello paywalls and popups begging you to disable ad-blockers so they can feed you, you guessed it, more popups.
SidePlayer allows you to have an affair with a player on the side, you little minx. And by that I mean you can watch Youtube Videos in the corner of your screen rather than having to switch to a separate tab. Luxury. Why this isn’t a standard feature on every browser remains a mystery.
Social Fixer, to put it simply, fixes Facebook. Living under the mild tyranny of Mark Zuckerburg is a price countless million seem prepared to accept. Well, Viva la revolution! Social fixer allows you to filter post by keyword, run gifs automatically, and block out whole swatch of the interface. No more reading only what they want you to read! No more Trump related posts from your uncle Dave! No more bullshit!
The Great Suspender. The Great Suspender is, well, great. It allows you to “pause” the 24 tabs you have open at this very moment and concentrate on a ingle one. This saves all kinds of resources, prevents auto-reloding, and saves bandwidth. e]Essentially essential.
Bonus Round
VPN’s or Virtual Private Networks, are proxy servers that let you use someone else’s ISP, bandwidth, and location. Besides hiding your various illicit activities, VPN’s let you get around regional steaming lockouts of sporting events, download limits, and oppressive regimes. Most come with both free and pay editions, so feel free to try them out first.
All browsers offer to save the password you input, but this is not safe if you share your computer. Nor does it allow you to keep passwords in storage among multiple devices. And you really need to stop using your dogs name and birth year as your password for everything. It’s embarrassing. Perhaps the best security feature these offer is ability to let them generate (and remember) random passwords for you, allowing you to use a fresh one for each site and account you use.
