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Internet Firefox hacks - best browser for mobile and desktop. Ad free YouTube! Ad free browsing! YouTube in the background on phone for free.

simstim

simstim

Bluelighter
Joined
Apr 20, 2021
Messages
6,606
Firefox is the best browser for Android and desktop use. Mozilla is one of the oldest and most mature free open source products on the market

First, use Firefox beta for Android so you can do this:
Hack your user agent to enable all posting features on bluelight.org

This also gets you a chrome user experience on your Google searches.

Then click the three dot icon in Firefox to open the menu, click add-ons, then add the "video background play fix" add-on, and the "ublock origin" add-on.

Video background play fix keeps YouTube from finding out that it's in the background and allows you to play YouTube in the background for free!

Ublock origin is an ad blocker. It even blocks YouTube ads!! I recommend checking the settings for ublock origin and turning on 99% of the filters. You'll never see an ad on the web again!

Now you can watch YouTube all day long ad free and you can leave it playing in the background!! No more need to pay for a YouTube subscription for those features!

If you install Firefox on your desktop Google "ublock origin Firefox". Install this add-on.

Now you won't have ads on your desktop. Including YouTube ads!!

Another cool hack on your desktop... Check out the free streaming service tubi.tv

This streaming service has tons of TV shows and films and is ad supported. If you use your computer to watch TV in Firefox on Tubi ublock origin will block the ads! Now your streaming service is ad free!!

Another add-on that I recommend for Firefox for desktop is downthemall.

With downthemall you can easily download any link or media on a page. The way this really shines is with large downloads because downthemall has a download manager that allows you to pause and restart downloads (this isn't built into Firefox). Downthemall also significantly increases your download speed by opening multiple concurrent connections to the server and each concurrent session downloads a chunk of the file. With multiple connections to the server files download much faster than the single connection that Firefox (and other browsers) use by default to download files.

There are many more Firefox add-ons and hacks!

Firefox for Android used to be better because it used to use the same add-ons as the desktop browser. For whatever reason they stopped this several years ago and now the number of plugins available on Android is severely limited.

Post your own Firefox hacks!!
 
I switched to Brave recently after years of using Firefox and I don't regret it. The mobile app isn't great, but at least it has adblocking - which Firefox iOS never did and Firefox Android no longer seems to have.
As previously mentioned by users somewhere else on here (I think an STH thread), Firefox has some security concerns that Chromium-based browsers such as Brave and Google Chrome (the latter having some serious privacy issues, however) do not.
 
you can block the cookie from your favorite news outlet that only lets you view 3 articles and then wants you to subscribe - go to firefox settings, then privacy and security, scroll down cookies and site data, click manage exceptions, add the link for that website, click Block, and save changes - now you can read without limits

you can also hit the toggle reader view to get around pay sites too - sometimes that works but not too often
 
Firefox is a total resource hog and is very slow by comparison to other browsers in my experience. It was a pioneer at its inception but it's a bit old now. I've also recently switched to Brave and Brave Rewards (getting paid for ads and then you can use auto-contribute so that goes back to the sites you visit) is awesome. It even has its own crypto wallet that I haven't tried yet and an integration with Tor, they're probably not private enough for DNMs but certainly for very private browsing.
 
i use ff mobile and desktop. the both suck but been using the browser since it was "cool". seems to have lost a lot of its assets and gained some liabilities.
they all suck but ff will let me play stuff in the background while browsing other sites if i minimize ff to call on another app it dies. :(
hate mobile until i need it. like a weapon.
so anyone else use ff on mobile device(s)? any tips?
 
6am-64-14m said:
i use ff mobile and desktop. the both suck but been using the browser since it was "cool". seems to have lost a lot of its assets and gained some liabilities.
they all suck but ff will let me play stuff in the background while browsing other sites if i minimize ff to call on another app it dies. :(
hate mobile until i need it. like a weapon.
so anyone else use ff on mobile device(s)? any tips?
Click to expand...
Yes!

You need to install the "Video Background Play Fix" addon for Firefox mobile.

Then even if you minimize Firefox and go to other apps it will play in the background.
 
Yeah, I've tried other browsers. Opera on desktop and mobile is probably a bit faster and lighter than Firefox. built in compression and vpn too. That's my number two choice.

I usually use opera mini on shitty government smart phones I've gotten because of their very limited RAM resources. Chrome and Firefox were useless on those.

UC Browser is very fast and light and it has a decent download manager built in, but it has ads.

I just stick with Firefox because it does what I want it to. It has add-ons and extensions that I use and have used for the last twenty years.

I've been using Firefox since it was still Netscape back on windows 3.1 before it was free and open source.
 
too bad mobile ff (android) doesnt support spell check. my posts are really bad sometimes i know. unless i am missing something...? anyone find a sp ✓er for it?
 
6am-64-14m said:
too bad mobile ff (android) doesnt support spell check. my posts are really bad sometimes i know. unless i am missing something...? anyone find a sp ✓er for it?
Click to expand...
On Android it's up to your keyboard to make spelling suggestions and corrections. That's never gonna be a browser feature on Android because it's part of most keyboard software.
 
I love Firefox

although i know it does, i dont notice it eat up too much resource on my setup and ive been known to have 25 tabs opened at the same time

i have Brave too and it's coo - i use it sometimes....im just super familiar with FF so i keep sticking with it

i use it on my phone too but sometimes its a little quirky and i have to use chrome on that
 
I guess cause I'm not all that much of a user of extensions, other than a couple for work, I hadn't really considered those.

Stumbleupon was good though.
 
I think Firefox used to be really good. Now it's slowly being watered down but I guess that's what happens in a marketplace saturated by directions that Mozilla has never really been interested in pursuing. You have to yield eventually. I think Google has funded Mozilla for quite some time now essentially propping up the browser and preventing it stagnating. Firefox was all about the open internet at one point and transparency. Now it's slowly becoming generic like any other browser. They force Google search on you which is annoying.

That being said, Firefox is one the last remaining browsers you can customize to a tee. You can get into the bowels of Firefox through about:config and do things you simply can't do with other browsers.
 
imo_incolae said:
I think Firefox used to be really good. Now it's slowly being watered down but I guess that's what happens in a marketplace saturated by directions that Mozilla has never really been interested in pursuing. You have to yield eventually. I think Google has funded Mozilla for quite some time now essentially propping up the browser and preventing it stagnating. Firefox was all about the open internet at one point and transparency. Now it's slowly becoming generic like any other browser. They force Google search on you which is annoying.

That being said, Firefox is one the last remaining browsers you can customize to a tee. You can get into the bowels of Firefox through about:config and do things you simply can't do with other browsers.
Click to expand...
Thing is, this could cause you to get fingerprinted more since it makes you more 'unique'

As @arrall said, Chromium browsers are more secure than Firefox which actually gets funding from Google if I'm not mistaken
 
nomorebenzos said:
Thing is, this could cause you to get fingerprinted more since it makes you more 'unique'
Click to expand...

the fingerprinting panic is deceptive because handing over less information is always better than handing over more. it's technically true that the more you customize, the more information you give away about yourself, but most of that granular fingerprinting happens via JS, which doesn't take place if you BLOCK JS on sites you don't trust, as you should be doing.

the only sites you want to go vanilla for are ones like online banking, where the other party already knows you personally and will be the most likely to use fingerprinting for fraud detection.


Mr. Krinkle said:
hey smart guys

i got a question

why does Brave use google chrome extensions?

:Sherlock:
Click to expand...

because it's based on Chromium, like Chrome.
 
Firefox is an even bigger memory hog than the chromium based browsers. Some windows/tabs open and after a while it would use most of my 16G. Both browsers are amazing pieces of technology somehow given that you can scroll lag-free through a document with many thousand pages, you have WebGL and all the funky stuff but the memory use is somewhat off.

For android there was YouTube vanced for a while, a hacked version without ads and activated background play but now it's not available anymore. Somehow in brave the background playing works too, don't know how they make that. But what I hate about brave is all that crypto spamming.. Oh, there's also a hacked version of spotify and one of deezer around which both give suscription for free. I know, I know, piracy but given HOW little they actually pay to lesser known artists I have no problems pirating them.
 
plumbus-nine said:
Firefox is an even bigger memory hog than the chromium based browsers. Some windows/tabs open and after a while it would use most of my 16G. Both browsers are amazing pieces of technology somehow given that you can scroll lag-free through a document with many thousand pages, you have WebGL and all the funky stuff but the memory use is somewhat off.
Click to expand...

Firefox has a setting that lets the browser start without loading tabs from last session, so you can have hundreds of tabs open but only the ones you activate manually will be increasing memory usage.

The memory usage is mostly from JavaScript running per tab. Chrome|ium is better about this because tabs are individually sandboxed so they can be crashed individually without taking down the whole browser. OTOH, if a tab crashes in FF the whole browser goes, too.
 
thujone said:
OTOH, if a tab crashes in FF the whole browser goes, too.
Click to expand...
Oh, didn't know that firefox has no sandboxing but I am using an extension for Brave/chromium which suspends background tabs after a while and only reloads them upon a click, this saves a shitload of memory.
 
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