For reasons beyond the scope of this entry, I recently set up a new Firefox profile. As a new profile it needs to be (re) customized for my preferences, including extensions. I can't just use my regular browser's set of extensions because this profile is for staying logged in to Twitter and needs to be set up so that Twitter is usable. Also, I don't want to spend a lot of time maintaining it, because I'm only going to use it once in a while.

Since there may be more single-use profiles like this in my future, I'm writing down my current set of essential Firefox extensions for this sort of environment. They are:

• FireGestures is just as essential here as it is in my regular browser. Its various gestures are part of my automatic reflexes by now and it's disconcerting to be in a browser environment that doesn't support them.

• uBlock Origin is a painless way to keep the tracking and advertisement and other invasions of my privacy down to a dull roar. A great benefit is that it basically needs no maintenance, so I can just ignore that I have it installed.

• Self-Destructing Cookies is a painless way to clean out the underbrush of invasive third party cookies that I'm probably slowly picking up every so often (partly from following the odd link from Twitter to elsewhere). I allow Twitter's cookies to persist so that I stay logged in, and everything else gets quietly junked.

  (In general SDC is good for any low usage or specialized profile where I want to use the low friction model of cookie handling.)

Although I've considered it, I'm not currently using NoScript in this profile. In theory NoScript shouldn't be blocking anything because I only use this profile on Twitter and I'd have to whitelist Twitter's JavaScript; in practice, it's likely to need at least periodic attention to whitelist some new domain that now has JavaScript that's necessary to keep Twitter working.

(If I follow links from Twitter to other sites in this profile, I may regret this choice. But I generally don't do that, since I read Twitter almost entirely through choqok and choqok is set to open links in my regular browser session.)

A number of my regular extensions are okay here and potentially useful, but aren't compelling enough to bother installing in a new profile that I'm using this way. Part of this is that Twitter allows you to control video autoplay in your settings, so I have it turned off; if that changed, FlashStopper or some equivalent might become important.

(Things would be a bit different if you could build bundles of extensions and extension preferences that would all install together. Then I'd probably roll in more of my standard extensions, because each additional extension wouldn't be a little additional drip of hassle to get and customize.)