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Since this article is about Firefox add-ons, we focus on Firefox’s marketplace (the official place to get the add-ons).
While nothing is 100% bug-free/secure, there are a few things one can check:
Add-on Badges: Look for ‘Recommended‘ or ‘By Firefox‘ badges; ignore add-ons with includes a caution badge/icon.
Starts, Reviews: While this alone doesn’t give much assurance, this is one thing that you can consider among other aspects. Also, focusing on the number of reviews can help you know if it’s popular enough among users.
Add-on Permissions: Some add-ons will require permissions like ‘Access browser tabs‘, ‘Access browser activity during navigation‘, etc. Make note of this and decide your level of comfort for which permission is being used.
Last updated date: Sometimes, even good, well-known extensions are not updated. This is okay, but for stuff like Password Managers, Ad blockers, this is a big deal. An add-on that’s over 2 months old should always be used with caution.
Add-on Publisher: Always make sure that the publisher of the add-on is someone you trust, or has published an add-on that you already trust.
With that said, let us take a look at a few of the extensions that improves your web browsing experience.
Bitwarden has everything that I would look for in a password manager. It costs just $10, if you want to upgrade to its premium plan and not self-host it. I highly recommend its Firefox add-on!
4. LanguageTool
Grammarly? While I don’t have any issues using Grammarly, something that I really like and prefer is free and open-source software. LanguageTool is an excellent tool one can use for checking grammar inconsistencies like spelling errors, using a different spelling (color vs colour), commonly confused words (then vs than) and you also get a thesaurus with it.
In my experience of using this add-on, it has worked reliably on almost all text fields. No issues there. The two biggest features of this add-on are as follows:
More than 25 languages are supported. Supported languages are listed at the bottom of the ‘About this extension’ section.
When you search for the term “Red Lamborghini”, you get images of a red-colored Lamborghini. But, what if you didn’t know what car it was? This add-on allows you to search for images, using the image–instead of textual terms–and shows similar results or the source of origin for that image.
You have the following ways of choosing an image for a search:
Select URL: This allows you to just click on an image that is displayed on the web page.
Capture: Clip a specific area of the web page for a reverse image search.
Browse: Upload an existing image from the computer’s local drive (instead of the web page).
URL: Paste in an image URL (from a different web page) for a reverse image search.
Add-on Badges: Look for ‘Recommended‘ or ‘By Firefox‘ badges; ignore add-ons with includes a caution badge/icon.
