uBlock Origin

HISTORY— Okay, this one requires a longer backstory than most, so bear with me here.

The original AdBlock (which later became AdBlock Plus) dates back to the early 2000’s, but for the sake of brevity, we’ll just start when the standard AdBlock browser extension was released in 2009, when Google Chrome originally added support for browser extensions. AdBlock was then sold to an anonymous buyer in 2015, which also coincided with AdBlock’s introduction of their participation in the Acceptable Ads program. This program, created by Adblock Plus in 2011, began allowing “non-annoying”/non-invasive ads to be shown to users.

uBlock itself was created in 2014 to be a pure ad blocker — annoying or not, if it was an internet ad, it would be blocked. Alas, after the original creator left uBlock in 2015 to create his own fork of the project — uBlock Origin — the original uBlock went unsupported for a couple of years, before returning in 2017. The following year, uBlock was acquired by AdBlock and swept into the Acceptable Ads program, thus removing its status as a pure ad blocker.

uBlock Origin remains the biggest pure ad blocker to this day, even being the most popular browser extension on Firefox alone.

ABOUT — uBlock Origin is a pure ad blocker, blocking all ads regardless of invasiveness or annoyance.

PROS
• Pure ad blocker
• Zapper tool to remove any undesired webpage features

CONS
• On very rare occasions, uBlock Origin might break certain features of a webpage. However, this is easily fixed by temporarily turning off uBlock Origin, should you expect its messing with anything on your screen.
• Google and Apple have been rolling out new foundations for Chrome and Safari respectively, and these new foundations make it impossible for uBlock Origin to work to its full potential. As such, your best bet on these two browsers is to use uBlock Origin Lite, which works with reduced functionality.

SponsorBlock

ABOUT — SponsorBlock is a browser extension that skips segments of YouTube videos based on category labels submitted by other members. You can also customize whether to auto-skip, ask to skip, or not to skip specific categories, among other customization options.

In my personal experience, this browser extension has become popular enough that most highly-viewed YouTube videos and channels have these categories labeled within hours of uploads. It saves me a ton of time, with my particular favorites being skipping over sponsored segments and previews/recaps that spoil the rest of the video.

SKIPPABLE CATEGORIES
• Sponsor
• Unpaid/Self Promotion
• Exclusive Access (labels entire videos)
• Interaction Reminder (Subscribe)
• Highlight
• Intermission/Intro
• Endcards/Credits
• Preview/Recap
• Hook/Greetings
• Tangents/Jokes

Return YouTube Dislike

ABOUT — Return YouTube Dislike is a browser extension that brings back the ability to to see dislike statistics on YouTube videos. It does this through a combination of archived data from before YouTube removed dislike numbers, and extension user behavior. Video dislikes don’t update very frequently by YouTube’s own design, but its better than nothing.

Privacy Badger

ABOUT — Privacy Badger is a browser extension that stops advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking you, soaking up your data, and selling it to the highest bidder. What makes this extension different from traditional ad blockers (such as uBlock Origin) is that Privacy Badger is primarily a privacy tool more focused on blocking trackers themselves, rather than simply ads.

Allow Right-Click

ABOUT — Allow Right-Click is a browser extensions that does exactly what its named for: it allows you to right-click. On its face, it sounds pretty pointless, but have you ever tried to right-click something on a page to copy-and-paste it elsewhere, only for the typical right-click menu not to pop up? This is for those situations when a website doesn’t want you to do that, but you want to anyway.

Save Image As PNG

ABOUT — Save Image As PNG is a browser extension that gives you the option to specifically save an image as a PNG file when right clicking on it. This prevents the annoyance of saving an image online, only to find it unusable due to it being a WEBP file (which is actually superior, but due to a lack of support for more user-friendly usages over the years, has come to be quite hated).

AHA Music

ABOUT — AHA Music is a browser extension that helps you identify music playing in your browser. Unlike the more prominent Shazam, AHA Music isn’t owned by Apple, so instead of pushing you towards Apple Music when it identifies a song for you, it will simply link you to a YouTube video.