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Firefox for Data Scientists: Browser Extensions for Research and Analysis

Data scientists spend significant time in the browser — reading papers, tracking code libraries, monitoring market data for financial analysis work, and writing reports. Here are Firefox extensions that support a data science workflow.


Monitoring arXiv and research publications

News Widget Dashboard — RSS feeds from research sources on the new tab.

Data science moves fast. Following arXiv is standard practice. arXiv machine learning feed: http://export.arxiv.org/rss/cs.LG. Statistics feed: http://export.arxiv.org/rss/stat.ML. Add these to News Widget and new papers appear on your new tab.

Other useful RSS sources:

  • Google AI Blog
  • Towards Data Science (Medium)
  • Fast.ai blog

Tab management for papers and notebooks

Tab Manager and Session Saver — save named sets of tabs per project.

A deep learning project might involve tabs for: the paper being replicated, three reference papers, the GitHub repository, the documentation for the framework, a Stack Overflow answer about a specific implementation detail. Tab Manager lets you save and restore this research context.


Quick calculations

Quick Calculator and Unit Converter — arithmetic, percentages, and unit conversions on the new tab.

For quick sanity checks (what percentage improvement is that? what is 1.5 standard deviations in this context?), the new tab calculator is faster than opening a Python REPL or a calculator app.


Writing and documentation

AI Writing Assistant — grammar checking for reports, READMEs, and technical documentation that runs locally.


Daily research priorities

Daily Planner — today's specific research tasks on the new tab. "Implement ablation study," "Write results section," "Review teammate's PR."


Stock and market data for finance/quant work

Stock Market Dashboard — for data scientists working in finance or FinTech, a live watchlist of relevant market symbols on the new tab provides ambient awareness during the day.


All six are part of a series of 11 Firefox extensions I built — see the full series.

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