My favorite Firefox addons, Google has some, they don't seem to work as well as they do in Firefox. Firefox addons are consumer fanbase generated. Making them is a way of life for some users.

1 Legibility : A simple slider lightens up a dark background to make text readable (such as on Steam). The other slider increases or decreases text size. There are competitor apps but this one runs slick and smooth sliders for easier settings.

2 Playback Speed: on any site at all, including Youtube, single mouseclick to choose .4  .6 . 8  1  1.2  1.4  1.6  1.8  or 2.0 X playback speed. Faster to find the exact setting speed sweet spot to take less time to view it but still be understandable.

3 ABP: The Firefox version blocks all YT adds, if you set it to do that, the Chrome version will not of course, would cost Google money if it did.

4 Search by Image: Point to any image on the web and 5 different search engines, Yandex, Bing, Google, Baidu, and Tin Eye will immediately search to find all similar images all over the web. It works Very fast (in seconds).

5 Read Aloud: Select any text and it reads out in sound, works so much better than the windows version.

6 Simple Translate: Translates selected text, or an entire webpage, or an entire website into English. I can read German hobby forums messages just fine. But, all translation engines seem to be so much better these days, not just this one.

 

Kaosfere,

My heartfelt and sincere thanks for that link mate. I have now tried and tested it and it appears to have made YouTube more than bearable,

It absolutely amazes me that so many people find these little software titbits and again that they share them.

Thanks again mate.

Tony

Thanks Kaosfere for the link.  Does anyone know if it is possible to get something for my Samsung smart TV?  I love watching the videos on the big screen, but the adds have become really irritating lately.

Also, on browsers, I have been using a Chromium based one called Brave during December, and I am really surprised by it.  It will still load all of the Chrome based plug-ins, such as Web of Trust (WOT) that I use.  Brave, combined with Cloudflare Warp DNS (1.1.1.1) have transformed my internet usage.  It imports chrome settings/bookmarks.  I won't be going back to Chrome. I think Brave will really catch on. 🙂

8 hours ago, bobcat999 said:

Does anyone know if it is possible to get something for my Samsung smart TV? 

The best answer is "sort of but not really".   Without getting too technical, uBlock and other browser extensions have an advantage that other solutions don't have in that they can examine the actual content of a page and act intelligently on things your browser is being asked to load before it loads them.  This allows it to have some "intelligence" when it comes to filtering out things like Google's ads.

There are a couple of general ad-blocking tools you can use to help reduce the overall ad content on all your systems.  First and easiest would be using a DNS provider that blocks ads by not letting your systems talk to known advertising domains.  I don't know if your CloudFlare DNS service does this, but I don't think it does.  The main one here that I know of is AdGuard DNS, but I've not heard great things about their speed or reliability.  An alternative would be to use a DNS service that lets you specify a list of hosts to block, such as OpenDNS, but that requires manual work and maintenance, which you probably don't want to be doing.

The better option, if you don't mind doing a little more work, would be to set up an ad-blocking proxy on your network and route all your traffic through that.   The best known of this is Pi-hole, which was originally intended to be run on a Raspberry Pi, but can run on other systems.  It does take a bit more knowledge to set up, though.  And it's still prone to the problem, when it comes to YouTube ads in particular, that YouTube often changes the servers they come from so it takes a little work to keep an black hole list for them up to date.  There are a few sources for them.  Here's an example of what one looks like.   You can see the problem. 🙂

You can also buy hardware devices that are pre-configured to do things like this, but they can be a little pricey since they're often meant for businesses.   You could do a bit more investigation here by googling "ad blocking firewall" or "ad blocking proxy".

So, unfortunately, nothing for your TV is going to work as well as a browser extension.  Your best bet in terms of functionality and stability would be to buy a Raspberry Pi for $40 and install Pi-hole on it.  (Unless you have another computer that you leave on all the time where you can run it.)   The easier one would be signing up for AdGuard DNS or something similar and determining whether you're happy with their functionality and performance.

Awesome, huh?

Since this has shifted to a general computer  comments, I'm moving it to Hangar Chat