welcome to the internet toolbox of ~ comfy box ~
This page aims to be a high quality resource for improving your experience on the modern day Internet. Here you can find, and add your own recommended websites, tools, scripts, knowledge, browsers, software, et cetera.
Mozilla Firefox
Fuck Google Chrome, stop using it. Firefox is the easiest browser for normal people besides Chrome, and it is much better for your privacy and cybersecurity. Firefox has built in protections against cross-site tracking, fingerprinting, cryptominers, and social media. You can customize it with themes and add-ons just like Chrome, and you can easily import all your bookmarks and shit too.
I highly recommend you check out the Firefox Profilemaker in order to take advantage of Firefox's most advanced features and customizations without the hassle of editing about:config and user.js yourself. Advanced users should check out Arkenfox user.js.
I don't fuck with having a Mozilla account and Firefox sync or any of that shit. You'll have to disable Mozilla's telemetry to preserve your privacy.
Tor Browser
I think its used for browsing something called the "dank net". Also something about onions, I don't really know, I don't use the internet
Librewolf
Librewolf is essentially a hardened fork of Firefox, for end-users with privacy and security at the forefront of their minds. It cuts out all of Mozilla's propriety bullshit they've loaded up Firefox with, and as a result it's more secure. I've personally been using this browser for years now, and it has been nothing short of an incredible experience. I'll shill Librewolf til I die. Not convinced? Take a look at how it stacks up vs. other web browsers at privacytests.org (added by faen)
Mullvad Browser
Developed in collaboration between Mullvad VPN and the Tor Project, The Mullvad Browser is a privacy-focused web browser designed to be used with Mullvad VPN. Similar to the Tor Browser, the Mullvad Browser prioritizes anti-fingerprinting to protect against online privacy threats. Telemetry data collection has been completely eliminated.
Privacy and security add-ons:
uBlock Origin The only ad blocker you will ever need. Easy enough to use for anyone, yet advanced enough for the most privacy conscious. Good enough for your grandma by default. You can pick from pre-defined filter lists, or define your own filters. You can point and click on any element to remove it if you want it gone. You can globally whitelist or blacklist scripts on a per-domain basis. It's so fucking good, I can't believe there is motherfuckers out there that still use shit like AdBlockPro or whatever the fuck.
Cookie AutoDelete Easily control the cookies that websites store on your computer. Aside from the obvious feature, it works for automatically clearing most other types of website data including cached files, LocalStorage, IndexedDB and more. You can also whitelist/greylist cookies on a per-domain basis.
ClearURLs A lightweight add-on that automatically removes tracking parameters from URLs. This means shit like ?utm_source=newsletter1&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=sale will be removed from URLs before you click on them. You can supposedly use uBlock to accomplish the same thing.
LocalCDN
LocalCDN is a web browser extension that emulates Content Delivery Networks to improve your online privacy. It intercepts traffic, finds supported resources locally, and injects them into the environment.
Firefox Multi-Account Containers
Extremely underrated add-on. Create isolated browsing environments to isolate cookies and other browsing data. Most commonly used to use more than one account at the same time on a website or service.
Customization add-ons:
Tree Style Tabs Display your browser tabs on the side of the screen and organize them efficiently.
Stylus
Redesign your most frequently used websites with thousands of custom user-made themes, and easily create your own if you know CSS.
I don't care about cookies
Hide cookie warnings and banners from websites. When websites require the user to accept cookies, it will accept all by default. The perfect companion for Cookie AutoDelete.
Violentmonkey
Violentmonkey is an open source userscript manager. Userscripts are custom JavaScript files used to add additional functionality to a website, or remove the annoying parts. Greasy Fork is an excellent source of high-quality userscripts for hundreds of different websites.
Website specific add-ons:
SponsorBlock
Open-source crowdsourced browser extension and open API for skipping sponsors and other annoying segments in YouTube videos.
4chan X 4chan X is a userscript for 4chan and most Tinyboard/vichan based imageboards. Adds a ton of features such as keyboard shortcuts, advanced filtering, image gallery, auto-redirect to archives, desktop notifications and more.
Indie Wiki Buddy When you visit a wiki on Fandom/Fextralife it get redirected to an independent wiki or a BreezeWiki version of the page. It also allows filtering Fandom/Fextralife wikis from search engine results.
~ comfy box ~ recommended add-ons:
SingleFile Instantly create an easily-sharable offline copy of any single webpage. Stores all images (via base64 encoding) and stylesheets in a single convenient HTML file. Easily save all open tabs, or let it automatically save every page you open when you tell it to. Allows you to add annotations and metadata also remove elements before saving.
Flagfox
Instantly view basic information about a website. IP address, geolocation, ISP, Whois, DNS lookups and more.
Link Gopher Extract all URLs from a single webpage.
Search by Image Right click on an image or insert a URL to instantly reverse-search on one of 30 supported search engines, including Google, Bing, Yandex, trace.moe, SauceNAO, IQDB, TinEye, Getty Images, Pinterest, Adobe Stock, Alamy, and much more.
Web Archives
Instantly search for a URL in various web archives and caches, including Wayback Machine, Google cache, Archive.is, Bing cache, Yandex cache, and more.
DownThemAll!
Download all links and/or images on a webpage.
Video DownloadHelper Painlessly download nearly any video from nearly any website. For quick, one-off downloading of single videos, this is the best tool out there.
Easy Screenshot
Take a screenshot of an entire webpage, from top to bottom.
General privacy and security:
KeePassXC Fully featured cross-platform password manager that stores your information locally in an encrypted database file.
Supports 2FA, has browser extensions and auto-type for quick logins, a secure password generator, and allows you to store files in your database.
VeraCrypt
Easily create virtual encrypted storage volumes, or encrypt entire storage devices or OS partitions.
Create hidden decoy volumes for plausible deniability when the police come to your door.
Mullvad VPN
Unlimited bandwidth VPN for €5 (EUR) a month. Lets you pay fully anonymously, even accepting cash mailed to them in an envelope.
Account creation and payment requires no personal information whatsoever. This is the only VPN I would ever recommend to anyone.
Have I Been Pwned? Check if your account credentials appear in any database breaches or leaks. Contains 11,838,500,639 account credentials in total.
Adguard DNS Ad-blocking at the DNS level. Easy to set up on any device, including your router.
Alternatively, you can check out NextDNS, a paid service with more customizability.
Onionshare
Instantly set up a Tor Hidden Service to share files, host a website, and chat with your friends securely and anonymously.
Privacy checkup:
Redact
Free tool to automatically wipe your posts and content from sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Discord and more.
Choose the types of content to delete, filter by date, keyword, and more. Or, you can easily nuke everything.
Personal Security Checklist
A curated checklist of tips to protect your digital security and privacy. Suitable for beginners and technical users alike.
IDCrawl Search a username, or real name, and find associated social media accounts, e-mails, news articles, public records and more.
Sherlock
Instantly check for the presence of a username across hundreds of different websites and services.
WhatsMyName
Basically an online version of Sherlock.
The Privacy Redirect browser add-on automatically redirects Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram links to Nitter, Invidious, and Bibliogram, respectively.
Windows tools:
Privatezilla Easy to use tool for disabling the most commonly unwanted features and telemetry of Windows 10.
An alternative "community package" adds support for more advanced modifications.
Privacy.sexy
An online tool for Windows and MacOS which lets you choose the exact modifications you want, and automatically generates a script for you based on the options you selected.
The tool generates the script in real-time, so you can always see exactly which changes you are making to your system.
simplewall
A GUI frontend for Windows Filtering Platform (WFP). Commonly mistaken to be an alternative frontend for the default Windows Defender Firewall, which is untrue.
However it is much more lightweight and allows for more customization.
Advanced windows tools:
Optimize-Offline
Collection of Powershell scripts for removing components from a Windows ISO before installation. If you don't know what you are doing you will fuck shit up.
MSMG Toolkit An alternative to Optimize-Offline which is much more user friendly, but still entirely possible to break shit. Video tutorial
Win Toolkit A GUI alternative to MSMG Toolkit. Again, it is still entirely possible to break shit. Video tutorial
Wayback Machine
Everyone knows this one, hopefully. You give it a URL and then pray to god that your URL has been captured before. Alternatively, you give it a URL to save, and pray to god that it hasn't been banned from being saved. Although it is the most reliable, and really one of the only web archives, they are extremely prone to removing content for being offensive or at the request of website or content owners, without doing too much verification before they nuke shit.
Archive Today / archive.is Popular alternative to the Wayback Machine. Much slower than the Wayback Machine. Allows visitors to download copies of captured webpages in zip files. Censored in some countries likely due to the content in some of it's saved pages. Does not block domains from being archived, I think? Some consider Archive.today to be untrustworthy. Privately funded, and could go down forever at any future moment in time.
GNU Wget Plain and simple command-line downloading utility. Download single URLs, a list of URLs, an entire directory or a whole website. Creating full mirrors won't work well on javascript-heavy sites, especially if the entire page content is dependent on JS. Great for downloading open directories.
Many other tools similar to wget exist and are worth checking out: wget2, httpie, wpull, you-get, aria2
qBittorrent The only good torrent client. Has some weird features like a built-in search engine. Please do not use µTorrent or Vuze or any other shit.
If you've got a server you want to remotely download torrents to, you should check out ruTorrent or Deluge.
Specialized tools:
DiscordChatExporter
Download all messages and files from DMs or servers that you are a member of. Supports multiple different export formats. Has a CLI and GUI. Might get your Discord account terminated.
JDownloader2
General-purpose download manager. It is in the "Specialized Tools" section because in my opinion, the only thing it is good for is mass-downloading from cloud services and DDL sites (shit like Rapidgator and 1fichier using services like Real-Debrid or Premiumize). Somehow, it can bypass transfer quotas on Google Drive and MEGA. I fucking hate this thing, its buggy, the devs are sketchy, they used to bundle adware, and it behaves in various unexpected ways by default.
Internet Archive CLI
Command-line tool for retrieving and uploading data from the Internet Archive. Great for downloading or uploading mass amounts of shit and making bulk edits to metadata.
youtube-dl A command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and other video sites. There's plenty of forks with added functionality, yt-dlp for example, but this is the originator. If you're too lazy to deal with the command line there's a GUI frontend.
yt-dlp
Youtube-DL is no longer frequently updated, gets throttled by Google all the fucking time, has more, way crazier features, and supports more streaming services.
I'm sure there is GUIs for it, but I wouldn't even bother, because you'll be entering command-line arguments to get the most out of this thing. This shit is the gold standard of video downloaders.
Grabber
Imageboard/booru downloader which can download thousands of images from multiple boorus very easily. Allows you to easily organize the images you download based on tag, artist, date, rating, and more. Also saves image metadata if desired.
Telegram Telegram has chat exports built into the desktop version. I don't think this feature has been updated since it released, but it mostly works. You can choose a date range, the type of files you want to download, a max file size limit, and JSON or HTML file format. You can export any private chat, group chat, or channel... almost. In 2021 Telegram allowed users to disable forwarding and exporting on channels that they own. There's a pretty cool 3rd party tool that uses the Telegram API and looks a lot better than the default Telegram archiver.
ArchiveTeam Warrior Help the Archive Team archive websites by running a Virtual Machine to download sites and upload it to their archive.