Browser plugins

Posted by: Phoenix42

Browser plugins - 11/05/2012 14:41

I was introduced to Ghostery today
Quote:
...Ghostery that blocks all of the little 3rd party trackers that sites have. I'd heard of it on Security Now, but thought it was just for privacy concerns. I was wrong.

After installing Ghostery and enabling it to block all of its built-in list of trackers, Deadline and Hitfix now load almost instantly. In fact, every page I go to seems quicker. It's also fun to see how many "bugs" each site has. So far Huffington Post has the most that I've seen with 17(!)

I've run into a few little oddities like ESPN's player not working, but a simple checkbox was all that was needed to enable the CDN that ESPN uses.


It is interesting / scary, the number of trackers in use on some sites - the plugin can be configured to tell you. For example boston.com has nine, bbc.co.uk has seven, facebook has none, which is suprising, but maybe AdBlock is coming into play, or maybe facebook is already doing all the tracking in the background.
It does consume about 24MB or RAM, don't know yet if it is living up to any increase in performance claims.

edit: They support IE, FF, Chrome, Opera, Safari and iOS
Posted by: RobotCaleb

Re: Browser plugins - 11/05/2012 17:34

I use Disconnect. I think it is pretty similar.

Here's a Hacker News discussion about them.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3033883