i have a long and annoying history of writing ludicrously long comments on youtube videos and reddit posts about techshit and then sending them to hell (tumblr or mastodon drafts) but i decided not to send this one to hell i guess. this was in response to a few people proposing that having a singular extension is ideal. also i've been writing these in markdown but i also haven't actually been posting them. if something's busted lmk.

i agree with the one extension strategy generally but i also have some caveats: a multitude of extensions is fine as long as they aren't all trying to do the same thing. i've never had any particular performance issues despite technically having multiple *blockers at a few points because i reconfigure them to deal with one thing each if i have a particular reason to add one. but for instance with what i have right now, sidebery doesn't act on websites outside of it's own and isn't competing with ublock, enhancer for youtube could compete with ublock but isn't because i turn the blocking off, my useragent switcher isn't doing anything that would interfere with the other ones. i have libredirect set up to specifically target twitter and instagram and nothing else. if i ever have any performance issues it's because firefox is fighting an eternal battle with my demonic custom stylesheet but that's an entirely separate issue and i was aware of it when i crafted that foul beast.

youtube is an interesting issue from a performance perspective because, and this could well be intentional because of the privacy problem tbh, it has an insane number of the elements that will activate just about every activable extension on earth. i don't even necessarily disagree with the design for what youtube is, but when most of your website is international forums underneath a video player, that is just what's going to happen. you can trace the mechanisms in OP's screenshot. on any given youtube video you'll get hit with an autotranslation if you turned that on, the grammar checker probably sleeps until a textarea loads in somewhere, coupon checker starts running a search for the shop link in the description because any big youtuber has one of those at this point if they like eating and being alive, tts is probably pretty agnostic to what source the text is coming from (i have a bone to pick with mozilla on this one also.), the youtube-focused ones obviously all fire instantly. did i mention this is a reactive website? this is a reactive website. meaning, you don't have to be able to see an element for it to be there at any given time.

youtube will also absolutely maul things that inject custom stylesheets through any sort of read-and-replace mechanism rather than loading on top of it. just take my word for it, i do not recommend trying to parse the youtube css. did you know the legacy css for the old themes is still in there? it's completely useless and never gets loaded by anything.

the whole fingerprinting thing is a real problem and i do make a mild effort to minimise that simply because it coincides with my browser performance desires but frankly i'm a quitter. if i see a malicious digital behaviour that i cannot do anything about, i'm not fighting the good fight, i'm moving on with my life because handing my existing anxiety disorder things i could be scared of is foolish. depends on what you care about at the end of the day, but that is certainly an area where if you care about it the single (and extremely popular) extension is the optimal setup.

however.

i have to assume that english is not OP's native language and that's really the point i keep getting stuck on. i've tried to work with firefox's stupid native screen reader from the other side of things multiple times now and i cannot even get it to grant reader mode. while trying to research the metrics it uses to determine whether or not to allow reader mode, i found that nobody really even knows anymore. this is a massive accessibility issue. the idea that one needs to keep a pristine ratio of other elements to text or else visually impaired people and ELLs at a certain level just do not get to read that website? actually monstrous. scattered amongst the fun browser playtoys in there is a really great stack for somebody who is pretty decent at english and can generally navigate an internet that is obnoxiously oriented towards english speakers, but struggles somewhat and is interested in learning more. why the actual hell is that happening and why is it allowed? the translation, okay, whatever, google chrome has a built-in translator because google has a translator and it's nonstandard, but gun to my head i'd tell you the only reason firefox isn't fully proprietary complete with a price tag is because they're failing to meet rudimentary accessibility standards and thus would get locked completely out of doing business in the EU. it sucks that a lot of websites aren't coded to accept the prefers-dark signal, and yeah that's not on browsers, but that started as an accessibility option and still remains such and what you get for that really is "change these four colours" or "system theme" and somehow that's the only thing i've mentioned that has a somewhat viable native implementation. i found out last month that every device i own has reduced motion turned on. i didn't even notice. i don't have epilepsy, i don't have nystagmus, i just find the post-smartphone world annoying. if you look up preventing animations in firefox, you get sent to about:config. even just turning off gif autoplay is not in the front-facing settings menu? to stop all animations in a world that does not comply with established accessibility specifications, you either need two separate extensions or one that is so targeted to meet that need that it makes you more identifiable. the reasons these options in particular exist are because people could die. on some level offloading language tools to extensions is less important not letting the visually impaired participate in society because you integrated your screen reader with your stupid article viewer that weighs paragraphs against lines of javascript and embedded svgs, which is less important than living human beings could stop being that. but they're all important.

i don't think firefox resisted chrome's transition to adblock hostility because mozilla is more user-oriented, i think they've offloaded an astounding number of problems to extension developers and have more to lose from not having than that google had to gain from preventing adblocking. which is crazy.

i like mozilla, mostly. i really like one of the founders of mozilla, who i find to be one of exceedingly few foss voices that isn't constantly covering their ass for just in case one of his projects randomly makes him rich, or uses security as a vague fear tactic that can later be used to make incredibly stupid anti-user software decisions.

i like firefox. google's not super great about these things either so i doubt chrome has some cutting-edge accessibility features. if we're totally honest, that is a webapp-oriented browser and most accessibility features will hurt somebody's dogshit material UI noto knockoff-helvetica regular reactjs single svg logo in the upper left corner next to hamburger menu "branding" because their shade of i'm-appealing-to-dark-mode-lovers charcoal is slightly different than everyone else's and 10pt font is an identity or something. i don't think not being a native english speaker is a disability, just that these things are all intricately connected. i watch movies with subtitles just out of preference, everyone abuses dark mode these days, on average most people don't use wheelchairs but most people do benefit from an elevator if the building is tall enough. web devs are bad about supporting accessibility and you lose some formatting if you use your four colors to simulate a dark or high contrast mode. knocking screen reader perms loose from firefox's death grip is a trial. for a while i complained constantly about firefox prematurely adopting vw and vh, which is a good choice overall! but broke a lot of shoddy scaling, and again, you have to go to the menu with the warning that scares people who aren't super technologically literate to turn off gifs.

or you could install a get fingerprinted kit.

if there was a better option, i would find this unacceptable. i already do find it deplorable. i'm a little bit visually impaired and, as you may be able to tell, completely insane but i'm mostly able-bodied and i can interpret language at an acceptable speed with both my eyes and brain and i know the language american websites want me to know. i lift enough weight and achieve the angle necessary to safely move my monitor closer to me if need be. i can hear, so bad autosubs don't necessarily impact my ability to understand the spoken word. i have somewhat of a grasp on how a browser works and how to walk the tightrope between opsec and meeting my need to connect with other humans and have my thoughts acknowledged occasionally. i'm not walking it right now obviously but to be fair, the best thing anyone could sell about me here is a desire for better accessibility and that's clearly not happening. my hardware is better than the secondhand thinkpad somebody could afford with SSI six years ago. none of this necessarily has to affect me at this point in time and i could drop every extension, userchrome/usercontent modification, and accessibility menu toggle (not actually true on my system but if i start criticising GNOME here it's going to get far worse than it already is) right now and run vanilla firefox largely unimpeded.

a lot of people do not even have the option to begin caring or not caring about their privacy and it's absolute fucking bullshit. they don't even have the option to care about ethics. AI is pretty great primarily as an accessibility device, but it's an accessibility device that has drawbacks. i can refuse to use it. maybe my tone will always suffer, maybe i can't make spongebob sing linkin park without being able to operate UTAU, but i also don't need it to be able to understand and be understood.

i, and this is not accusatory i don't even remotely get the sense that you would get uppity at me from any of these angles, get that this conversation will almost always end with some kind of squabble about whose burden accessibility is. scope sometimes. any particular webdev's right to pass the buck to the browser, whose own developers can then pass it once more to the operating system, who can then meet the bare minimum of "you can zoom in on things" and "here's our two secret alternate themes that we palpably do not want you using" and "the option is available if you dig through this tertiary nested settings menu", or even "okay i sent the signal to the internet hopefully javascript michelangelo cares about you". some people will discuss at disturbing lengths what disabled people "need" access to. do disabled people "need" old school 4chan-style impact font memes? i don't know why don't you go ask some asshole nurse at the local group home. i get that it is a burden. i get that i'm fighting a losing battle with shrugged shoulders and that i'm not doing anything to combat it. i get that my typing style, which is fully my choice, is in itself inaccessible to some people. for dyslexics, the absence of shape variation between glyphs is a major facet in how difficult reading a body of text is. i know this. but i'm also just some guy. i barely talk to anyone. i'm not a widely-used webapp. i'm not a game. i'm not youtube. i don't make any of those things. i make what is apparently an average of two reddit comments per year and hope that nobody looks at them because it stresses me out. i have a personal website that sucks. i still want anybody who stumbles upon it to be able to participate in being horrified by how much it sucks.

it's just kind of sad and disappointing. it wasn't a realisation i wanted to be having or dots i wanted to be connecting. maybe OP is just fully fluent in english and sighted but lazy, or constantly looking somewhere else. maybe OP is one of those semi-illiterate kids that got spat out by the current US english-teaching meta. maybe they spend a lot of time on chinese websites. i don't have any problem with that. i want any or all of those to be well-supported choices. choices are good when they aren't between privacy and being able to use the internet at all.

i like technology a lot and have for as long as i can remember, but as time goes on i find being saddled with that interest more and more abhorrent.