David Mays Blog: 10 Firefox Add-ons For Safer Browsing Experience

Today’s internet is no longer the only source of information and entertainment, but also a place of treachery and theft. Hackers, trojans, spam, and phishing scams, are just some problems and dangers that exist in the World Wide Web.

But there is no need for this to stop us from fully utilizing the web. This is especially true for Firefox users who have an arsenal of great Firefox add-ons that will help ensure that your browsing experience can continue protected.

Here are 10 such Firefox add-ons (or plugins if you will) that can help give you a better and safe browsing experience while on the Web.

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HTTPS Everywhere

HTTPS Everywhere is a project started by Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that fights for your digital rights.

This tool will help secure your browsing experience by making the browser load the https version of any site you visit.

Under https mode, the data sent from your computer is SSL-encrypted, safe from prying eyes and man-in-the-middle attacks.

WOT

WOT stands for Web of Trust. WOT is an online community which tries to identify untrusted or spam websites and maintains a list of trusted websites.

The WOT plugin safeguards your online activity by informing you if the website you are about to access is safe to visit or not. The plugin will show you a trust meter for websites and search results as well as warn you when you are at the verge of accessing an untrusted or spam website.

You can contribute to the WOT community by giving your rating about websites you have visited, and help others browse safely.

Adblock Plus

As the name suggests, Adblock Plus blocks all types of advertisements shown on websites. Apart from being annoying and detrimental to user experience, ads, when misplaced or misused, can also track your online activities by way of locking down the links you click or visit.

If however you stop these ads from showing on all the websites you visit, your favorite sites will stop getting ad revenue and lose their financial backing to keep the site running.

The solution provided is that you can allow non-intrusive ads that you don’t find annoying to continue showing with Adblock Plus, while avoiding ads from, for example, malware-spreading websites.

NoScript

NoScript is a powerful add-on for Firefox, which allows you to block JavaScript, Java, Flash and other executable content present on the web pages you visit.

You can create a whitelist and allow some trusted websites (like your home-banking website) to run executable content on the browser.

By blocking executable content on unknown websites, this plugin protects you against cross-site scripting attacks (XSS), cross-zone DNS rebinding or CSRF attacks (router hacking) and Clickjacking attempts.

Websites in the whitelist are allowed to run content, which will allow you browse your favorite websites without any problem.

Ghostery

Ghostery is a useful add-on to protect your privacy and online activities from being tracked, particularly by advertising companies who are interested in getting information about you for marketing purposes.

Ghostery sees the web page and detect trackers, web bugs, pixels and beacons.

After identifying who’s tracking you, Ghostery will give you options to know more about these companies.

It will provide links to their Privacy Policy and opt-out options. With Ghostery you can also block scripts from companies you don’t trust, delete LSOs and block images & iFrames.

Privacy Badger

Privacy Badger is a helpful plugin that sniffs out the websites that are secretly tracking your activities on the Internet and blocks them.

Once you install this plugin, you do not need to feed it the list of websites to block, instead, it automatically combs out the ones that may be tracking you online.

In addition to tracing and blocking the privacy-invasive websites, the plugin removes any link click that may track you down to your Facebook or Google account – keeping your digital footprint private.

Privacy Possum

If you’re concerned about advertisers and corporations tracking your online activities for their use, then Privacy Possum may be helpful to you.

It blocks websites and blogs from tracing you through common commercial tracking methods like cookies and digital phenotyping.

It is a reliable plugin that works in a way that it reduces and falsifies the data that the advertisers and search engines may gather on you so your online activities stay private.