 I have a love hate relationship with browser extensions, and this is a weird thing to have I suppose, but it's true. I can't really stand the idea of bringing in a ton of extensions that will blow down my browser, bring in potential security risks, and all that stuff. It bugs me that I need it to happen. But every time I switch to a browser that doesn't have extensions, I miss them. Now, I don't miss all the knowledge, because there's a lot of browser extensions that are just completely worthless. In fact, I'd say the vast majority of them are completely worthless. But I like the idea of having the option to have them, and there are a few that I just kind of can't live without. So every time I switch to a cute browser that doesn't have extensions, there are just a few that I miss. And it kind of always drives me back into a browser that has extension support. So what I thought I'd do today is talk about five browser extensions that I just can't live without. Now, a couple of things. First, I'm not sure if these are open source or not. I didn't check the licenses on them. Some of them are. Some of them probably aren't. So just keep that in mind as we go along. The second thing is, is that I believe out of the five that I'm going to show you today, only one of them is not applicable across multiple browsers. I'm using Brave as my browser right now. So we're going to be mostly dealing with the Chrome Web Store, which is where the Brave browser gets its extensions from. I believe four out of the five will also have either exact matches for Firefox or something similar. And I'll try to point those out as we go along. So if you're using Firefox and I wish I was most a lot of times, I still wish I was wishing using Firefox, you should be able to at least find options for the ones I'm talking about today in the Firefox extension store or whatever hell they call it. So let's go ahead and jump in. OK, so the first one on the list is kind of generic. And what I mean by that is that really it doesn't matter what brand of password manager you're using. This tip kind of applies across all of them. So for me, it's bit warden. Install your password manager browser extension. So I have brought I have bit warden up to the, you know, install right here. I'm not going to open it because it might have email addresses or something in there. And I just want to want to show that off. But the point is by having the extension installed, it saves you a lot of time. So you can go through and open up the app if you want. And then you can sign in because most password managers lock after 15 or 30 minutes. And then you can go to the search application or the search box, search for the website, copy the username, hide the application, go to the website you were going to sign into, paste your username, open the app back up, find the password, copy it, go to the password field, paste the password, then you're signed in. That's a huge pain in the butt, right? It's not something you want to have to do unless you absolutely have to. So by having the browser extension, it kind of removes several of those steps. So first is stay signed in for as long as you have the browser opened. Unless you've said it otherwise by default, at least bit warden, stay signed in for the entire session of the browser. That may be a little bit of a security risk, but that's the way I have it set up. The next good thing about it is that it enables Autofill. So when you're on a login page, right click on the field that you want to fill, go to bit warden, and then click that feel, the appropriate field. So username or password, and it will fill it for you automatically. If you don't want to use Autofill, you can go, you can open up the tab up here and it automatically filters for the site that you're on. So if you're on Reddit, for example, and you want to sign in, it shows you the Reddit credentials and you just hit it and it will Autofill or you can copy and paste the username and password from there. You don't have to deal with having to go through and searching for whatever websites, like you would if you were just using the application. So I highly recommend using the password manager extension for whatever password manager you're using. They're all pretty much the same when it comes to this. They all have extensions. They're all varying levels of good. I use bit warden because it's open source and it's great. I highly recommend it. But if you're using one password or N pass or key pass or last pass or whatever the pass you're using, use the browser extension. I don't know if there is a browser extension for the actual pass program, like the GNU pass program. I don't use it. So I don't know if there's something like that for that or not. But if not, you could probably use something for like Rofi for that. The last thing I have to say about this is that this is a cross browser solution. This applies no matter what browser you're using. They all pretty much have like bit warden has browser's plugins for all the browsers, including like opera. And I don't know anybody who uses opera. So you can use this, use this particular plugin or any of the the password plugins for pretty much any browser that you're using. So the next one on the list is chromium specific. So if you're using a chromium based browser, this is the one. This is one that's just going to apply for you because Firefox, you guys, they're using Firefox. You have it good and they do downloads just fine. They hide it in a menu exactly where they should hide it. But if you're using a chromium based browser that's not of all the or edge, if you're just using one that looks like brave does or like on Google chromium or chrome itself or chromium itself, whatever, you'll know what I'm talking about when I say that there's when you download something, there's this big gigantic honking bar at the bottom of the screen every time you download something. It doesn't matter what you're downloading. It could be an ISO. It could be an image. It doesn't matter. Everything that you download, there's this gigantic bar comes up along the bottom and it won't go away until you dismiss it. It's annoying. And the stupid thing is if you're like me and you have poor vision and you sometimes or oftentimes forget to wear your glasses because you're dumb ass and you've zoomed in on a website, the bar actually gets bigger. Like it grows with the zoom. It's so stupid. I can't stand it. The only reason I'm able to use brave or chromium based browser is because I found this plug in disable download bar and it does exactly what it says on the tin. It disables the download bar. You'll never see it. And I love it. It's probably my new favorite web extension. It just is awesome like nice. Now, like I said, if you're on Firefox or something like that, you don't need this extension at all. But if you are on a chromium based browser and you can't stand the bar like I can't stand the bar, download this. It'll go away. You'll never see it. It's awesome. Anyways, that's number two. Now, the next one on the list is one that I can show you. So let's just say you are on a website. Let's just say you're on Ventoy's website. I'm going to be messing around with Ventoy later on this afternoon. I've moved on from my Fedora long term review. So I'm looking to install some more Linux distros on my other hard drive. And I'm using Ventoy to do it. But let's just say I wanted to read about it on my phone. Now, if I was using Firefox and I had Firefox on both my phone and my computer, syncing tabs is not a hard problem. Same thing if I was using Brave on both my phone and my computer. Syncing tabs, not a big problem. However, if you're using different browsers, like I am, like I use Safari on my phone. I have an iPhone. I use Safari because it's just the best on the iPhone. It still sucks, but it's better than all the rest. Getting a link from there to hear from my computer to my phone is a pain in the tuchus. It's not a good experience. Now, I could use something like SnapDrop if I wanted to send a picture or something like that. But sending a link is not that easy. So what I've found is a little app called QR Code Generator. And it just lives up here in the bar. You click on it. It gives you a QR code. You open up the camera app on your phone. And this will work on Android or iPhone. You pull up your camera. It kind of like focuses on the QR code. You press the link and it opens up in your default browser. And that's literally all it does. And you can make a QR code for anything. You'll just take a QR code of the link that's in the URL bar and allow you to go there. That's all it does. And I found it indispensable because I do a lot of reading of online stories and stuff. And sometimes I just don't want to keep reading that kind of stuff on my computer. I'd much rather read it on my phone so I can go sit in an easy chair somewhere instead of having to have a computer in front of me. Being able to send that story or whatever from my computer to my phone with that QR code has become something that I just kind of rely on. This is also one of those extensions you can have in any browser. I did the same thing in Firefox when I was using Firefox. It's just a lot of times it's easier to do the QR code thing than it is even to use the browser's built-in sync features. When I was using both Firefox on my computer and my phone, I was still using the QR code because it was just easier to do than having to navigate and find out where the hell ever Firefox on iPhone hid the synced computers list. And they did hide it too, by the way. It's like three or four steps in order to get to it. It's just annoying AF, as they say. So the next one on the list is called surfing keys. Now, this is Chromium and Chrome-based specific, but there are options for Firefox and other browsers as well. So what basically what surfing keys does is it allows you to use VIM keys for navigation in your browser. And so you can do JKL to navigate between pages and up and down. You can use GG and G to go from top to bottom. You can use several other key bindings to open up tabs and open up new URLs, create bookmarks, all this stuff. Using VIM keys, it's amazing. Now, surfing keys isn't the only browser extension that does this. For Chromium-based browsers, there's other one called CVIM that works pretty well. They all work basically similar. If you're on Firefox, there's one called VIM Vixen that is spectacular. You should definitely try that. I miss VIM Vixen because it actually kind of reminds me of Kube browsers UI a lot. It's really good. You should definitely download VIM Vixen if you're using Firefox. It basically does the exact same thing as surfing keys. It just has a different UI and stuff, but it does basically the same thing. I use the VIM keys in the browser all the time. Like, seriously, it's Kube browsers best feature. With the VIM keys, I love being able to use the VIM keys. So I had to find some way of doing that in an actual fully-fledged browser. So that's surfing keys. It's really good. And you should definitely find a solution for your browser as well as VIM Vixen on Firefox. Surfing keys here, receive them here as well. There are also a couple other ones for Firefox as well. You can try them all. You'll find one that's good. Just enable VIM keys in your browser. You'll thank me later. So the last one on the list is called NewTab Redirecting. This one is mostly superfluous. It doesn't really add a lot in terms of productivity. Well, maybe it does, because it really depends on what you're using it for. For me, basically what this does is it gets rid of any of the NewTab stuff that your browser comes with. This is both Chromium and Firefox. I believe they're even called the same thing. I might be wrong. But both browsers have similar extensions. For Chromium-based browsers, NewTab Redirect is the one that I settle on. And basically what this does is it allows you to do, every time you open up a NewTab, redirect it to a URL. So in my case, I'm redirecting it to my start page that I created. And it has all of my links to all of my stuff and some cool GIFs. And that's what I use it for. You could use it to redirect to whatever. I mean, literally, as long as there's a URL to it, you could use it. I believe you can even have it redirect to an offline page. So something that, like, file, colon, slash, slash, and then a path to a file, I believe that would even work. So basically what it does is it just allows you to get rid of whatever the standard NewTab thing is. So for Firefox, it has the link to your most recent, or your most popular pinned websites or something. And then it has the pocket stuff at the bottom. For Chromium and Chromium-based browsers, for Brave, it has a picture. And it has your stats for how many ads it's blocked or something. Every browser has its own NewTab page. This gets rid of it and allows you to choose whatever you want. That's why I use it. OK, so those are the five extensions that I really can't live without. Now, there is one that was missing there and that I didn't cover. And that's you block origin. But I think that kind of goes without saying I have to have ad blocking in a browser. I just do. I whitelist the creators and websites that I want to support. And even that's painful because, like, so for example, I've disabled it on certain YouTube URLs so that I can support certain creators on YouTube. And that means I have to watch those ads and it's just completely painful. I also disabled it on certain websites. And ads just on the internet are horrible and they need to be fixed. But it's never going to happen. So yeah, you block origin is another one that would be on this list. But I didn't want to talk about it just because I always talk about ad blocking when I talk about this stuff. So I wanted to come up with five different ones. So that is it for me on this video. I'm hoping that I was able to edit out a lot of the stuttering in this video for whatever reason, I just could not talk with a damn. I don't know what's going on. It was just no talking for me today. It was just horrible. Anyways, that's it for me. That's it for me. Good Lord, Matt. I can't even talk. I'm glad this video is over with. I'm sure you are too. If you want to leave a comment in the comment section below, letting you know what browser extensions you enjoy, leave those below. You can make sure you hit the like and subscribe button. I really do appreciate everybody who does that. You can follow me on Twitter at the Linuxcast. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast. Before I go, I would like to take a moment to thank my current patrons. We'll see how many times it takes me to get through these names because obviously I must stutter through half of them. Today, Devon, Chris, East Coast Web, Gentoo's Fun2, Patrick L, Primus, Marcus, Megalyn, Jackson, M-Tool, Steve, CyberGrey Linux, Mitchell, ArtCenter, Amityus, Carbon-Dated Merit, Cam, Dresherly, J-Dogs, The Medecins, Rocks, Peter Ray, and Crucible. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.