After using Google Chrome for years, I switched to Samsung Internet Browser on my Android phone because of its simplicity and the features it has on offer. However, the one thing that both browsers lack is the availability and support for browser extensions. Extensions let you do simple tasks inside the browser, without switching to a separate app. My home screen was filled with single-use apps that I barely used. These apps not only ate storage but also used RAM for features that I used occasionally.

For using extensions, I switched to Firefox on Android, which supports real extensions unlike Chrome, and started replacing apps with extensions one by one.

Sink It

Makes the web version of Reddit actually usable

I love spending time on Reddit. However, the one issue with Reddit is that when you open it in a web browser, after a few seconds it asks you to log in or download the dedicated app just to read the entire post. This is what I feel is unnecessary and instantly makes the web version almost unusable.

If you use Reddit daily, it is fine to have the app on your phone, but if you visit it only occasionally, the web version should be sufficient (which, unfortunately, it isn’t). Reddit’s official app is fine, but after you log in, you are constantly bombarded with sponsored posts in your feed, which somewhat ruins the experience.

Sink It extension for Reddit is exactly what you will need for this situation. It adds color-coded comment threads, subreddit, and word muting, gesture-based upvoting, and, more importantly, strips the “Open in app” banner along with most ads. The best part is that everything happens on-device with nothing recorded or sent anywhere. So, you can still browse Reddit through your web browser without needing to download its app separately.

Firefox Relay

Disposable email addresses, built into the browser

I sign up for a lot of newsletters, trial accounts, and one-off online services for work. To use all of these, you need to use an email address, and the result of this is an inbox full of unwanted emails. My inbox literally turned into a spam dump. Notably, sometimes, important emails get lost in the sea of promotional emails from these services.

Then I stumbled upon Firefox Relay. This extension generates random email addresses right inside the browser. According to the extension description, free accounts can get up to 50 masks, and any email sent to a mask gets automatically forwarded to your real inbox without ever exposing it.

In case the mask starts attracting spam, you can simply turn it off from the Relay dashboard. You do not need to email support or change your actual address. This extension lives quietly inside your browser and eliminates the need to rely on any third-party app or service to generate disposable email addresses.

Read Aloud

Let your browser read those long articles for you

Being a content writer, I have to go through long articles, and reading them word-for-word isn’t the best option. My eyes also need a break sometimes. While I used to rely on a separate TTS app to get through long articles, it never worked cleanly with mobile web pages. This is where the Read Aloud extension for Firefox comes into the picture.

Using Read Aloud, you can convert whatever is open in your tab into spoken audio in one tap. The official listing confirms it supports over 40 languages, and as per its GitHub page, it can be pulled from your device’s built-in voices as well as premium cloud voices like Google Wavenet and Amazon Polly.

This extension supports a variety of websites and also PDFs and EPUBs. If you want to use Read Aloud, you simply need to tap the icon in the Firefox menu. There are shortcuts such as ALT+P, ALT+O, ALT+Comma, and ALT+Period to Play/Pause, Stop, Rewind, and Forward. You can also change the pitch, reading speed, and voice.

Worldwide Radio

Global radio without a separate app

Playing your own playlist is awesome, and there are a bunch of music player apps that you can use for such tasks. However, sometimes you can get bored of listening to the same tracks again and again. Radio lets you listen to songs that you might have been obsessed with a few years ago, but do not listen to now. It feels fresh to go back and listen to such songs after some time.

However, dedicated apps are either ad-infested or you have to pay the price to unlock their full potential. There is a Firefox extension called Worldwide Radio that streams from a catalog of nearly 50,000 stations from around the world. You can access them from a single toolbar.

You can build a list of your favorite stations, and because of all these features, it is one of the best radio add-ons for Firefox. With Worldwide Radio, you can also add your own station if the default list doesn’t include it. It also includes a sleep timer that turns off after a set period.

Setting this up takes a few minutes

You simply need to install the Firefox browser, then open the menu, tap on Extensions, search for the extensions, and tap on Add to Firefox for each one. None of these extensions require a subscription and give you features of a dedicated app right inside your browser. Support for extensions is something that is missing from Chrome and other browsers, which makes Firefox stand apart from them