[lmf4lol]

I am using Firefox for years now. It's such a splendid experience.

I can recommend the following extensions:

- Youtube Enhancer

- DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials

- Cookie Auto Decline (a MUST for Europeans)

- Slop Evader

- No Gender (a MUST for Germans)

Its a totally different browsing experience than what most people have.

I recently watched my kiddo looking something up with Edge on her laptop. I had to interfere and install Firefox. It was ridicolous!!! The amount of spam on the screen. How people can cope with this is beyond me. Especially if the solution doesn't cost anything. Just Firefox + some free extensions.

edit: because people asked about the No Gender extension:

Germany didn't have “gendered” language, until it was introduced some years ago.

Imagine the sentence: The teachers explain to their pupiles that the managers work only for the shareholders.

in regular German, it would translate to:

Die Lehrer erklärten den Schülern, dass die Manager ausschliesslich für die Anteilhaber arbeiten.

In gendered German, it became:

Die Lehrer:innen erklärten den Schüler:innen, dass die Manager:innen ausschliesslich für die Anteilhaber:innen arbeiten.

For me, it ruins the reading experience.

[MaKey]

For me the most important extension is uBlock Origin. It's worth switching to Firefox for this alone.

[onemoresoop]

Without your ublock origin browsing the net is quite horrible these days

[FridayoLeary]

Youtube is virtually unwatchable without it. I honestly have no idea how most people cope. Truth is, even with an adblocker there's so much rubbish on the page that gets in my way. Invidous is much better but it's too unreliable.

Sites that autoplay a video, which follows you as you scroll are the worst.

[MaKey]

I like the Unhooked extension. You can select which parts of YouTube you want to remove (e. g. Shorts). My start page is empty, I need to visit the channel pages to watch their videos.

[freedomben]

Or for real control, uMatrix (yes there are madmen like me still stubbornly hanging on)

[yubblegum]

that + NoScript. That latter is a must for me.

[qsera]

Firefox added split view where you can look at two (or more) webpages side by side. This is a lifesaver when you have to fill up a form looking up stuff from another page!

[echoangle]

Isn’t this kind of the job of the OS windowing system? It’s maybe slightly nicer to share the window chrome for two tabs but it’s not like looking at two browser tabs in parallel was impossible before.

[Cthulhu_]

Yes, and both Windows and MacOS have features to put things side by side... but they're not very intuitive and may require multiple inputs to achieve what the browser(s) do with one or two presses. On MacOS you have to long-press the "maximize" button, for example. I forgot that was a thing before reading this actually, but then I use the third-party tool Rectangle for window management.

[qsera]

Sure, but this is a lot nicer because when they are separate windows, and you have more windows, and if you have to alt-tab to check something else, it is a bit flow-breaking to bring these exact two windows back on top.

[yazantapuz]

Yes, but they are grouped under one single tab, so for me at least is more easy to alt-tab to other app and return to the split view.

[ButlerianJihad]

Chrome does this split-screen. Web browsers are operating systems, for all intents & purposes.

Ask any Emacs evangelist.

[2ndorderthought]

I love my emacs brothers and sisters but yea. If you are running docker emacs and a web browser you basically have 4 OSs running at the same time

[tomtomtom777]

Can you explain what the "No Gender" extension is about and why it is a must?

[MaKey]

It removes gender speech (Leser*innen becomes Leser), which can be awkward and hurt the reading flow.

[mmyrte]

It seems like you would lose meaning by automatically replacing words, no? Why would you want to censor your internet experience, just because you find someone else's use of language awkward?

[MaKey]

It's still the same word, just as generic masculine. Gender speech isn't part of the German language but an add-on with no standardization (that's why there are multiple different approaches). Apart from looking awkward one of the main criticisms is that it hurts the reading flow. Following that point the extension improves the reading experience.

[mofeien]

To prevent accusations of "masculinism" or sexism and to have a stronger case on having the goal to improve readability the add-on could include an option (or even make it default) to replace by generic feminine instead.

[MaKey]

The times where you have to try to appease small but vocal perpetually outraged groups are over. The German language has no generic feminine so adding it to the extension would contradict its goal.

[lmf4lol]

Germany didn't have “gendered” language, until it was introduced some years ago. It’s a terrible reading experience and super annoying.

Imagine the sentence: The teachers explain to their pupiles that the managers work only for the shareholders.

it was

Die Lehrer erklärten den Schülern, dass die Manager ausschliesslich für die Anteilhaber arbeiten.

and it became:

Die Lehrer:innen erklärten den Schüler:innen, dass die Manager:innen ausschliesslich für die Anteilhaber:innen arbeiten.

It’s insane.

[mmyrte]

Forgive my ignorance, but it seems that there is more information in the "explicitly inclusive" form than the "implicitly inclusive" one. Doesn't the existence of the inclusive form allow you to explicitly use a non-inclusive form? So in this case

Lehrer being explicitly male and Lehrer:innen being explicitly inclusive?

I appreciate that this seems to be an emotional topic, but if people choose to use language in a new way, would it not be best to not withhold that information from you as a reader? Someone else wrote that it's like using an ad-blocker, but if I were to read an article, I would want to read it in the exact form someone wrote it, no? It's a bit like Americans auto-replacing "fucking" with "f***g" in their browsers to avoid an annoyance, but they lose information in the process.

[lmf4lol]

As a German, you don’t really loose any information. it was introduced somewhere in the 2020s and is not (yet) standardized - and probably wont be.

We Germans know that the generic masculine includes both genders by default. It’s how we use the language.

[pjc50]

When was it introduced and why? It seems in the opposite direction of travel from many languages, which have been trying to make more gender neutral options available.

(exception: Chinese didn't really bother with gendered pronouns until about the nineteenth century, due to the need to translate European languages, so some had to be introduced)

[lmf4lol]

German feminist are looking for a long time to eliminate the generic masculine form. But unlike English, which allows you to use they/them to refer to both genders - and which i kind of like - German doesnt have such an option.

So since my youth, multiple proposal have been put forward, among which the gender-star. Lehrer -> Lehrer*innen, Lehrer:innen.

It was never taken seriously, until we got a left wing government (2022 or so) and since then its getting more and more used. Especially in progressive media. Some even speak it. With a short break that represents the star or :. Sounds pretty stupid, but people do it.

In my mind, its the ultimate form of virtue signalling :-)

but hey. to each their own. I just prefer to ignore it if possible

[bmn__]

People use the extension for the same reason people use other content blockers against advertisement, notices banners, social media widgets and so on, namely not to suffer avoidable annoyances.

> you would lose meaning

No meaning is lost that has not been there before.

> someone else's use of language awkward

Most would judge that it's not just awkward, but grating.

[Parae]

Doesn't really seem like a MUST then...

[lmf4lol]

I edited my comment to include an answer to your question.

[mft_]

I'd like to know too. I struggled to understand the description of the extension - is it an anti-woke thing, or some sort of modern approach to German removing the traditional (i.e. non-political) genderisation of some words, or both, or something else?

[MaKey]

Example: Reader

In German: Leser (masculine)

Possible forms of inclusive speech: Leser*innen, Leser:in, Leser_innen

This extension removes these possible forms of inclusive speech. Arguably they hurt the reading flow and the German language has the generic masculine. However, proponents of inclusive speech feel that the generic masculine isn't inclusive.

[input_sh]

A bit of both? Imagine every time you read the word "actor", it is instead spelled something like "actor:ress", or "actor_ress", or "actor*ress" (because the separator hasn't been standardised).

Personally I'm in favour of it, but I will concede that if it's done enough times throughout the text (as German has way more gendered nouns in common use than English) it does come with the downside of breaking the reading flow.

[plucas]

The first. In German, many words that refer to a person (e.g. Fahrer/Fahrerin, male/female driver) have a plural which is identical to the male singular. For a while now, many writers have used a typographic style to make the plural gender-neutral by writing the male plural, an asterisk, and then the female plural suffix (e.g. Fahrer*innen).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_star

[mft_]

Thanks - that's really interesting, in a weird-interesting way.

I'm far from an expert in such things, but I'd observed that the approach in English to gendered words (actor vs. actress) seemed to be, over time, to drift towards calling everyone an actor - as a neutral term, to avoid treating women differently, rather than a male term per se.

In German, from your explanation, it's gone the opposite way - aggressively maintaining the female option because of a dislike of broad adoption of the male version as a neutral default.

[input_sh]

It's not "aggressively maintaining the female option", it's just a language quirk. English has a gender-neutral "the" article which you put in front of every noun, German has three different variations of "the" depending on the gender (der/die/das). Literally every noun has a gender, including inanimate objects such as a piece of furniture. "The table" is always masculine ("der Tisch"), "the lamp" is always feminine ("die Lampe") and "the bed" is always neutral ("das Bett"). Sometimes changing the article completely changes the meaning of the word, for example "der See" is the lake, but "die See" can be the sea or the ocean.

Only living things can have more than one gender and in that case, not only does the article change, but so does the suffix. There is no "singress" in English, only "singer", but in German there's "der Sänger" or "die Sängerin". Calling a female singer "der Sänger" would be grammatically-speaking completely incorrect.

The only thing that changed fairly recently is that more and more people intentionally try to maintain gender ambiguity when they don't intent to specify a gender, in which case "the singer" becomes "die Sänger:in", or even "der:die Sänger:in" if you want to be even more pedantic.

[mft_]

Thanks; maybe I didn't explain my point well enough, but I know/understand everything you just wrote.

> The only thing that changed fairly recently is that more and more people intentionally try to maintain gender ambiguity when they don't intent to specify a gender, in which case "the singer" becomes "die Sänger:in", or even "der:die Sänger:in" if you want to be even more pedantic.

Here is my point: in English, the move to gender neutrality of certain words (e.g. actor/actress) seems to have involved adopting the male version, and using it as neutral. (I don't know if some people are offended by this, but if they are, I've not come across it).

In contrast, in German, I impute that some people would be offended by using the male version of a word as a default neutral for all including women, so are deliberately maintaining the female version within the slightly awkward "Sänger:in" construct.

This is a strong, deliberate choice, in contrast to (what I see as) the more passive "eh, let's just use 'actor'" in English.

[duskdozer]

English already has done this: fireman->firefighter, policeman->officer, mankind->humankind, man->humanity, etc.

[ekianjo]

Extensions are a vector for vulnerabilities and malware though. Its happened many times already.

[bakugo]

Computers are a vector for vulnerabilities and malware. We must all stop using them.

[ekianjo]

Nice strawman!

[_blk]

- Ublock origin - decentraleyes