Tag Archives: Web browsing

WIRED: The Internet Is Turning Into a Data Black Box. An ‘Inspectability API’ Could Crack It Open

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WIRED: The Internet Is Turning Into a Data Black Box. An ‘Inspectability API’ Could Crack It Open. “In addition to exposing surveillance, browser inspection tools provide a powerful way to crowdsource data to study discrimination, the spread of misinformation, and other types of harms tech companies cause or facilitate. But in spite of these tools’ powerful capabilities, their reach is limited. In 2023, Kepios reported that 92 percent of global users accessed the internet through their smartphones, whereas only 65 percent of global users did so using a desktop or laptop computer.”

WIRED: How to Switch Browsers Without Losing Your Bookmarks and Passwords

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WIRED: How to Switch Browsers Without Losing Your Bookmarks and Passwords. “IF YOU’RE THINKING of switching browsers—maybe because you like the features in a different application, or you’re fed up with the one you’re using—all of your accumulated data, extensions, and bookmarks can feel like a reason to stay put. It doesn’t have to be, though: Getting your data out of one browser and into another isn’t as hard as you might think.”

MakeUseOf: How to Use Google Translate for Specific Websites

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MakeUseOf: How to Use Google Translate for Specific Websites. “You can browse the web in any language with Google Translate. For instance, if you want to read an article from a German webpage, you can plug in Google Translate and translate all the content into English or any other language. Once you choose a language you want to see a specific website in, Google Translate will automatically translate all the pages you visit on that site. Here’s how to do this on both desktop and mobile browsers.”

MakeUseOf: 5 Free Anonymous Web Browsers That Are Completely Private

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MakeUseOf: 5 Free Anonymous Web Browsers That Are Completely Private. “Using an untraceable web browser leads to a much safer online experience. Fortunately, it’s easy to start using a browser that prioritizes your privacy. Here are a few of the best private browsers that are (almost) completely anonymous.”

TechCrunch: Arc browser’s new tool lets you remove some elements from a website

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TechCrunch: Arc browser’s new tool lets you remove some elements from a website. “The Browser Company, the company behind the web browser Arc, introduced a fun new tool today called Boosts. It lets you customize a website with new colors and fonts. But the best feature of this tool is that you can ‘Zap’ (read: remove) any element from a website like a sidebar or a trending topic box.”

The Verge: Why one web pioneer thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser

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The Verge: Why one web pioneer thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser. “Darin Fisher has built a lot of web browsers. A lot of web browsers. He was a software engineer at Netscape early in his career, working on Navigator and then helping turn that app into Firefox with Mozilla. Then, he went to Google and spent 16 years building Chrome and ChromeOS into massively successful products. Last year, he left Google for Neeva, where he worked on ways to build a browser around the startup’s search engine. And now, he’s leaving Neeva to join The Browser Company and work on Arc, one of the hottest new browsers on the market.”

WIRED: A New Attack Can Unmask Anonymous Users on Any Major Browser

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WIRED: A New Attack Can Unmask Anonymous Users on Any Major Browser. “…researchers from the New Jersey Institute of Technology are warning this week about a novel technique attackers could use to de-anonymize website visitors and potentially connect the dots on many components of targets’ digital lives.”

New York Times: For Blind Internet Users, the Fix Can Be Worse Than the Flaws

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New York Times: For Blind Internet Users, the Fix Can Be Worse Than the Flaws. “[Patrick] Perdue is one of hundreds of people with disabilities who have complained about issues with automated accessibility web services, whose popularity has risen sharply in recent years because of advances in A.I. and new legal pressures on companies to make their websites accessible.”

The Register: Tracking cookies found in more than half of G20 government websites

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The Register: Tracking cookies found in more than half of G20 government websites . “A study by IMDEA, a research facility in Madrid, Spain, evaluated more than 118,000 URLs of 5,500 government websites – think .gov, .gov.uk. .gov.au, .gc.ca, etc. – hosted in the twenty largest global economies (the G20) and discovered a surprising tracking cookie problem, even among countries party to Europe’s GDPR and those with their own data privacy regulations.”

9to5 Google: Firefox now automatically removes tracking parameters from URLs to enhance privacy

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9to5 Google: Firefox now automatically removes tracking parameters from URLs to enhance privacy. “According to an article from Bleeping Computer, companies like Facebook, Marketo, and HubSpot use custom URL query parameters to track links on clicks. Companies do this in order to provide users with a more personalized ad experience online. Called Query Parameter Stripping, these sites can no longer track what links you click when browsing on Firefox; once you’ve enabled the feature.”

Hongkiat: 10 Best Web Highlighters for Desktop in 2022

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Hongkiat: 10 Best Web Highlighters for Desktop in 2022. “Have you used any web highlighters? It helps us improve our productivity by copying and pasting important texts you’ve found online automatically, saving good articles in your directory, and highlighting important sentences on articles so that you can remember them when looking back. In this article, I’ll introduce you to 10 useful web highlighters for the desktop.”

Ars Technica: Some top 100,000 websites collect everything you type—before you hit submit

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Ars Technica: Some top 100,000 websites collect everything you type—before you hit submit. “Researchers from KU Leuven, Radboud University, and University of Lausanne crawled and analyzed the top 100,000 websites, looking at scenarios in which a user is visiting a site while in the European Union and visiting a site from the United States. They found that 1,844 websites gathered an EU user’s email address without their consent, and a staggering 2,950 logged a US user’s email in some form. Many of the sites seemingly do not intend to conduct the data-logging but incorporate third-party marketing and analytics services that cause the behavior.”

The Verge: Brave is bypassing Google AMP pages because they’re ‘harmful to users’

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The Verge: Brave is bypassing Google AMP pages because they’re ‘harmful to users’. “Brave announced a new feature for its browser on Tuesday: De-AMP, which automatically jumps past any page rendered with Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages framework and instead takes users straight to the original website…. Brave framed De-AMP as a privacy feature and didn’t mince words about its stance toward Google’s version of the web.”

Gizmodo: The Hidden Hack for Super-Speedy Web Browsing

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Gizmodo: The Hidden Hack for Super-Speedy Web Browsing. “Chances are you spend a lot of time in a web browser every day—so anything you can do to speed up the way you get around the internet is going to make a significant difference to your productivity levels (and give you extra time to do something more exciting). Yes, even on the best web browsers. Here’s one such hack you might not have tried yet: Mouse gestures.”