Valentine's Day saw Mozilla releasing version 110.0 of its Firefox browser. OMG Ubuntu highlights some of its new features: Firefox already supports importing bookmarks, history, and passwords from Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Chromium, and Safari but once you have the Firefox 110 update you can also import data from Opera, Opera GX, and Vivaldi too — which is handy.

Other changes in Firefox 110 include the ability to clear date, time, and datetime-local input fields using using ctrl + backspace and ctrl + delete on Linux (and Windows) — no, can't say I ever noticed I couldn't do that, either.

Additionally, Mozilla say GPU-accelerated Canvas2D is now enabled by default on Linux, and we can all expect to benefit from a miscellaneous clutch of WebGL performance improvements.

"Opera's adding a ChatGPT-powered tool to its sidebar that generates brief summaries of webpages and articles," reports the Verge: "The feature, called 'shorten,' is part of the company's broader plans to integrate AI tools into its browser, similar to what Microsoft's doing with Edge."

The "shorten" feature isn't available to everyone just yet, though. Jan Standel, the vice president of marketing and communications at Opera, tells The Verge that it's going to "launch in browsers very soon." Opera's also working on other AI-powered features that "augment" the browsing experience and plans on adding "popular AI-generated content services to the sidebar," although it's not yet clear what this could entail.
In the blog post Opera's EVP for PC Browsers and Gaming shared their belief that "with AI solutions springing up both for text, image, and audio generation and in countless other forms, we are at the brink of a new era of creativity on the Web."

The post says the forthcoming AI integration follows their "track record of giving users direct access to the internet's most in-demand platforms, such as TikTok, Telegram, and WhatsApp." And Opera's co-CEO added that "Whether inventing browser tabs or providing our users with built-in access to generative AI tools, we always push the limits of what's possible on the web."

Mozilla recently fixed a bug that was first reported 18 years ago in Firebox 1.0, reports How-to Geek: Bug 290125 was first reported on April 12, 2005, only a few days before the release of Firefox 1.0.3, and outlined an issue with how Firefox rendered text with the ::first-letter CSS pseudo-element. The author said, "when floating left a :first-letter (to produce a dropcap), Gecko ignores any declared line-height and inherits the line-height of the parent box. [...] Both Opera 7.5+ and Safari 1.0+ correctly handle this."

The initial problem was that the Mac version of Firefox handled line heights differently than Firefox on other platforms, which was fixed in time for Firefox 3.0 in 2007. The issue was then re-opened in 2014, when it was decided in a CSS Working Group meeting that Firefox's special handling of line heights didn't meet CSS specifications and was causing compatibility problems. It led to some sites with a large first letter in blocks of text, like The Verge and The Guardian, render incorrectly in Firefox compared to other browsers.

The issue was still marked as low priority, so progress continued slowly, until it was finally marked as fixed on December 20, 2022. Firefox 110 should include the updated code, which is expected to roll out to everyone in February 2023.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A man came in first at the Colorado State Fair's fine art competition using an AI generated artwork on Monday. "I won first place," a user going by Sincarnate said in a Discord post above photos of the AI-generated canvases hanging at the fair. Sincarnate's name is Jason Allen, who is president of Colorado-based tabletop gaming company Incarnate Games. According to the state fair's website (PDF), he won in the digital art category with a work called "Theatre D'opera Spatial." The image, which Allen printed on canvas for submission, is gorgeous. It depicts a strange scene that looks like it could be from a space opera, and it looks like a masterfully done painting. Classical figures in a Baroque hall stair through a circular viewport into a sun-drenched and radiant landscape.

But Allen did not paint "Theatre D'opera Spatial," AI software called Midjourney did. It used his prompts, but Allen did not wield a digital brush. This distinction has caused controversy on Twitter where working artists and enthusiasts accused Allen of hastening the death of creative jobs. "TL;DR -- Someone entered an art competition with an AI-generated piece and won the first prize," artist Genel Jumalon said in a viral tweet about Allen's win. "Yeah that's pretty fucking shitty." "We're watching the death of artistry unfold before our eyes," a Twitter user going by OmniMorpho said in a reply that gained over 2,000 likes. "If creative jobs aren't safe from machines, then even high-skilled jobs are in danger of becoming obsolete. What will we have then?" "I knew this would be controversial," Allen said in the Midjourney Discord server on Tuesday. "How interesting is it to see how all these people on Twitter who are against AI generated art are the first ones to throw the human under the bus by discrediting the human element! Does this seem hypocritical to you guys?"

He added: "I have been exploring a special prompt that I will be publishing at a later date, I have created 100s of images using it, and after many weeks of fine tuning and curating my gens, I chose my top 3 and had them printed on canvas after unshackling with Gigapixel AI," he wrote in a post before the winners were announced.

"What if we looked at it from the other extreme, what if an artist made a wildly difficult and complicated series of restraints in order to create a piece, say, they made their art while hanging upside-down and being whipped while painting," he said. "Should this artist's work be evaluated differently than another artist that created the same piece 'normally'? I know what will become of this in the end, they are simply going to create an 'artificial intelligence art' category I imagine for things like this."

Beacon of Galaxy message could be sent into heart of Milky Way, where life is deemed most likely to exist. From a report: "Even if the aliens are short, dour and sexually obsessed," the late cosmologist Carl Sagan once mused, "if they're here, I want to know about them." Driven by the same mindset, a Nasa-led team of international scientists has developed a new message that it proposes to beam across the galaxy in the hope of making first contact with intelligent extraterrestrials. The interstellar missive, known as the Beacon in the Galaxy, opens with simple principles for communication, some basic concepts in maths and physics, the constituents of DNA, and closes with information about humans, the Earth, and a return address should any distant recipients be minded to reply.

The group of researchers, headed by Dr Jonathan Jiang at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, says that with technical upgrades the binary message could be broadcast into the heart of the Milky Way by the Seti Institute's Allen Telescope Array in California and the 500-metre Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope in China. In a preliminary paper, which has not been peer reviewed, the scientists recommend sending the message to a dense ring of stars near the centre of the Milky Way -- a region deemed most promising for life to have emerged.

"Humanity has, we contend, a compelling story to share and the desire to know of others -- and now has the means to do so," the scientists write. The message, if it ever leaves Earth, would not be the first. The Beacon in the Galaxy is loosely based on the Arecibo message sent in 1974 from an observatory of the same name in Puerto Rico. That targeted a cluster of stars about 25,000 light years away, so it will not arrive any time soon. Since then, a host of messages have been beamed into the heavens including an advert for Doritos and an invitation, written in Klingon, to a Klingon Opera in The Hague.

As viewership drops for Hollywood's annual Academy Awards ceremony, "Everyone has a theory about the decline..." argues an opinion piece in the New York Times.

"My favored theory is that the Oscars are declining because the movies they were made to showcase have been slowly disappearing." When the nominees were announced in February, nine of the 10 had made less than $40 million in domestic box office. The only exception, "Dune," barely exceeded $100 million domestically, making it the 13th-highest-grossing movie of 2021. All told, the 10 nominees together have earned barely one-fourth as much at the domestic box office as "Spider-Man: No Way Home." Even when Hollywood tries to conjure the old magic, in other words, the public isn't there for it anymore.... Sure, non-superhero-movie box office totals will bounce back in 2022, and next year's best picture nominees will probably earn a little more in theaters. Within the larger arc of Hollywood history, though, this is the time to call it: We aren't just watching the decline of the Oscars; we're watching the End of the Movies....

[W]hat looks finished is The Movies — big-screen entertainment as the central American popular art form, the key engine of American celebrity, the main aspirational space of American actors and storytellers, a pop-culture church with its own icons and scriptures and rites of adult initiation.... The internet, the laptop and the iPhone personalized entertainment and delivered it more immediately, in a way that also widened Hollywood's potential audience — but habituated people to small screens, isolated viewing and intermittent watching, the opposite of the cinema's communalism. Special effects opened spectacular (if sometimes antiseptic-seeming) vistas and enabled long-unfilmable stories to reach big screens. But the effects-driven blockbuster, more than its 1980s antecedents, empowered a fandom culture that offered built-in audiences to studios, but at the price of subordinating traditional aspects of cinema to the demands of the Jedi religion or the Marvel cult. And all these shifts encouraged and were encouraged by a more general teenage-ification of Western culture, the extension of adolescent tastes and entertainment habits deeper into whatever adulthood means today....

Under these pressures, much of what the movies did in American culture, even 20 years ago, is essentially unimaginable today. The internet has replaced the multiplex as a zone of adult initiation. There's no way for a few hit movies to supply a cultural lingua franca, given the sheer range of entertainment options and the repetitive and derivative nature of the movies that draw the largest audiences. The possibility of a movie star as a transcendent or iconic figure, too, seems increasingly dated. Superhero franchises can make an actor famous, but often only as a disposable servant of the brand. The genres that used to establish a strong identification between actor and audience — the non-superhero action movie, the historical epic, the broad comedy, the meet-cute romance — have all rapidly declined...

[T]he caliber of instantly available TV entertainment exceeds anything on cable 20 years ago. But these productions are still a different kind of thing from The Movies as they were — because of their reduced cultural influence, the relative smallness of their stars, their lost communal power, but above all because stories told for smaller screens cede certain artistic powers in advance.
The article argues that episodic TV also cedes the Movies' power of an-entire-story-in-one-go condensation. ("This power is why the greatest movies feel more complete than almost any long-form television.") And it ultimately suggests that like opera or ballet, these grand old movies need "encouragement and patronage, to educate people into loves that earlier eras took for granted," and maybe even "an emphasis on making the encounter with great cinema a part of a liberal arts education. "

In 2014 one lone film-maker had even argued that Ben Stiller's spectacular-yet-thoughtful Secret Life of Walter Mitty "might be the last of a dying breed."

Web browser company Opera said Monday it will enable emoji-only based web addresses "to bring a new level of creativity to the internet." From a report: The integration is part of a partnership with Yat, a company that sells URLs with strings of emoji in them. "It's been almost 30 years since the world wide web launched to the public, and there hasn't been much innovation in the weblink space: people still include .com in their URLs," Jorgen Arnesen, executive vice president of mobile at Opera, said in a press release.

Opera has launched its Web3 "Crypto Browser" into beta with features like a built-in crypto wallet, easy access to cryptocurrency/NFT exchanges, support for decentralized apps (dApps) and more. From a report: The aim is to "simplify the Web3 user experience that is often bewildering for mainstream users," Opera EVP Jorgen Arnensen said in statement. A key feature is the built-in non-custodial wallet that will support blockchains including Ethereum, Bitcoin, Celo and Nervos from the get-go. It also announced partnerships with Polygon and others. The idea is to let you access your crypto without the need for any extensions, with the option of using third-party wallets as well. You can purchase cryptocurrencies via a fiat to crypto on-ramp, swap crypto directly in-wallet, send and receive it and check your wallet balance. It even has a secure clipboard that ensures other apps can't data when you copy/paste. The other primary function is support for Web3, aka blockchain-based decentralized internet, aka the buzzy new thing among crypto enthusiasts (and skeptics). On top of providing extra security via blockchain encryption, it allows users to access things like GameFi "where you can earn as you play your way through all sorts of metaverses," Opera notes. It also offers a "Crypto Corner" with the latest blockchain news that also "lets you grow your Web3 skills," according to Opera.

YouTube is testing an official way to download videos on your desktop web browser. From a report: If you want to see if you're eligible for the test, which runs through October 19th, check out YouTube's experimental features page, which lists tests available for Premium subscribers. If you're opted-in and on a supported browser ("the latest versions of Chrome, Edge, or Opera," according to Google), when you're watching a video, you should see an option to download the video under the player. When you click it, YouTube will download the video, which you can then watch from the Downloads section that's accessible from the hamburger menu on the left side of the screen.

Microsoft's upcoming release of Windows 11 will make it even harder to switch default browsers and ignores browser defaults in new areas of the operating system. While Microsoft is making many positive changes to the Windows 11 UI, the default apps experience is a step back and browser competitors like Mozilla, Opera, and Vivaldi are concerned. From a report: In Windows 11, Microsoft has changed the way you set default apps. Like Windows 10, there's a prompt that appears when you install a new browser and open a web link for the first time. It's the only opportunity to easily switch browsers, though. Unless you tick "always use this app," the default will never be changed. It's incredibly easy to forget to toggle the "always use this app" option, and simply launch the browser you want from this prompt and never see this default choice again when you click web links.

If you do forget to set your default browser at first launch, the experience for switching defaults is now very confusing compared to Windows 10. Chrome and many other rival browsers will often prompt users to set them as default and will throw Windows users into the default apps part of settings to enable this. Microsoft has changed the way default apps are assigned in Windows 11, which means you now have to set defaults by file or link type instead of a single switch. In the case of Chrome, that means changing the default file type for HTM, HTML, PDF, SHTML, SVG, WEBP, XHT, XHTML, FTP, HTTP, and HTTPS. Firefox's statement: We have been increasingly worried about the trend on Windows. Since Windows 10, users have had to take additional and unnecessary steps to set and retain their default browser settings. These barriers are confusing at best and seem designed to undermine a user's choice for a non-Microsoft browser.

Do gamers need a dedicated browser? Opera sure thinks so. Two years after launching Opera GX, a browser aimed at gamers, on desktop, the company has started to beta test Opera GX on iOS and Android. From a report: So what sets it apart from regular browsers? For starters, Opera GX features a control panel that lets you set limits on CPU, RAM and network bandwidth. Mobile users can also utilize the fast action button to quickly access functions like search and to open and close tabs. Exporting elements from the world of gaming, the button also uses vibrations and haptic feedback. You can also sync the mobile browser with the desktop version by scanning a QR code. Doing this will allow you to transfer across files of up to 10MB, links, YouTube videos, photos and various ephemera. The company says it expects Opera GX for iOS and Android to leave beta in a few weeks.

The iconic spacefaring adventure "Mass Effect" is back today with "Mass Effect: Legendary Edition," a single, remastered version of all three games. From a report: There is no series like "Mass Effect" -- even when it comes to BioWare's other choice-driven RPGs like "Dragon Age." "Mass Effect" is a big ol' space adventure first and foremost, but it's also about loyalty, love, and tough calls. "Mass Effect" follows Commander Shepard -- a hero players can customize for looks and gender -- across three games as they wage war against a galactic threat known as the Reapers. Key choices carry through all three games, whether it's who survives, or who you ally yourself with.

"Mass Effect" (2007) is a classic sci-fi thriller, where Shepard races to stop a turncoat operative hungry for power.
"Mass Effect 2" (2010) is a miscreant adventure centered on building a ragtag squad, culminating in a final "suicide" mission where everyone's survival is on the line.
"Mass Effect 3" (2012) brings the trilogy to a close through a more somber, war-focused story about loss and consequence.

"Chromium-based web browser Opera is all set to fully integrate with blockchain domain name provider Unstoppable Domains," reports TechRadar, "in a bid to provide millions of its users with decentralized web access." Opera users will now be able to access decentralized websites hosted via the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) using Unstoppable Domains' popular .crypto NFT addresses from the Opera browser. This will include platforms such as iOS, Android, Windows, Mac or Linux. Right now, Opera has over 320 million monthly active users across its offerings, following the addition of a crypto wallet to its browsers in 2019.

Unstoppable Domains was launched in 2018 and provides domain names to users with no renewal fees. Users of Unstoppable Domains are granted full ownership and control when they claim a domain because it is minted as an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain. Domain names such as .crypto replace complex wallet addresses for payments across over 40 cryptocurrency wallets and exchanges in addition to accessing the decentralized web through Opera.

Maciej Kocemba, Product Director at Opera said that the company believes in giving all people the ability to access the full web, regardless of the technology behind it.
The Opera product director was further quoted by Business Insider: "We have always supported web innovation, and the decentralized web or Web3 is the natural next wave. Making Unstoppable Domains accessible in the Opera browsers means our users can try blockchain technologies for themselves. Registering your .crypto domain, which is forever yours, is a great first step into Web3," the company's product director Maciej Kocemba said.

Opera is quickly becoming a leader in pushing for the adoption of Web 3.0, also often described as the decentralized web.

An Indian security researcher has published today proof-of-concept exploit code for a recently discovered vulnerability impacting Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and other Chromium-based browsers like Opera and Brave. From a report: The researcher, Rajvardhan Agarwal, told The Record today that the exploit code is for a Chromium bug that was used during the Pwn2Own hacking contest that took place last week. During the contest, security researchers Bruno Keith (@bkth_) & Niklas Baumstark (@_niklasb) of Dataflow Security used a vulnerability to run malicious code inside Chrome and Edge, for which they received $100,000. Per contest rules, details about this bug were handed over to the Chrome security team so the bug could be patched as soon as possible. While details about the exact nature of the bug were never publicly disclosed, Agarwal told The Record he spotted the patches for this bug by looking at the source code commits to the V8 JavaScript engine, a component of the Chromium open-source browser project, which allowed him to recreate the Pwn2Own exploit, which he uploaded earlier today on GitHub, and shared on Twitter. However, while Chromium developers have patched the V8 bug last week, the patch has not yet been integrated into official releases of downstream Chromium-based browsers such as Chrome, Edge, and others, which are still vulnerable to attacks.

Medium's tech site OneZero reports on "Rest of World" [dot org], which they call "a news site dedicated to telling technology stories about what's happening outside of North America and Europe," but founded as a nonprofit by the daughter of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt: Sophie Schmidt: We have big intractable problems in the tech and society category: misinformation, disinformation, surveillance, privacy, you name it. We're creating panels, and commissions, and we're shaking our fists at big platforms and saying, "Please fix it." And it feels a little bit helpless. But the thing that's not coming up is that every other country in the world is also dealing with it in slightly different ways.

What if the solutions to our problems lie in the sharing of those experiences, and ideas, and learnings? Expanding the dataset. It's honestly baffling. We have billions of people in the world all using technology all the time. I think the last data I saw said there's almost 5 billion people online. And depending on how you count Western versus non-Western, something like 80% of all humans live outside of the Western bubble. That means that you have almost an infinite number of parallel experiments, playing out simultaneously all around us just outside of you. So, why aren't we comparing experiences...?
Some of the interview's highlights:

• On the topic of emotion recognition software, a Rest of World senior editor points out "it's basically junk science. It's not based on any fundamental facts about human behavior... There's a lot of companies across China who are trying to use this faulty science for a number of different applications."

• The senior editor argues that our conception of the social credit score in China was off. "Some of the Chinese researchers I talked to were like, 'We got this idea from you. I have no idea why you guys are so upset about it.'"

• The senior editor agrees Clubhouse might change the way that politics works globally. "But I think the second option, which we're already seeing glimmers of, is that it's going to get banned in more places. And the places where it doesn't get banned, it's going to be very closely surveilled."

• Schmidt is proud of their follow-up on OKash, an African mobile-lending company partially owned by Opera that was accused of predatory loans through Android apps. "We did some digging and the Filipino SEC had banned, I think, 24 similar types of apps just a few months before that. And those ones were inspired by something that came out of China.
  
  "...the things that can happen outside of regulated environments tell us what the limits of tech are. They tell us what tech can be."

"A pro-China network of fake and impostor accounts found a global audience on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to mock the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic," reports the Associated Press, "as well as the deadly riot in Washington that left five dead, new research published Thursday found."

Slashdot reader schwit1 shared their report: Messages posted by the network, which also praised China, reached the social media feeds of government officials, including some in China and Venezuela who retweeted posts from the fake accounts to millions of their followers. The international reach marked new territory for a pro-China social media network that has been operating for years, said Ben Nimmo, head of investigations for Graphika, the social media analysis firm that monitored the activity. "For the very first time, it started to get a little bit of audience interaction," Nimmo said...

The posts appear to target social media users outside of the United States, gaining traction in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Venezuela — places where Chinese and U.S. diplomatic or financial interests have increasingly come into conflict. "The overall message is: America is doing very badly. China is doing very well," Nimmo said. "Who do you want to be like?" The network used photos of Chinese celebrities on the accounts and, in one case, hijacked the verified Twitter account of a Latin American soap opera show to post messages, according to Graphika's report... "There's this cherry-picking of narratives and events that make the U.S. look really bad," Nimmo said.

Last month, YouTube announced that it had removed more than 3,000 YouTube channels in December that were identified as part of Graphika's investigation into influence campaigns linked to China. Other Facebook and Twitter accounts identified in Graphika's report were also removed.

Opera has acquired YoYo Games, a British game development platform best known for GameMaker Studio 2, and is launching its Opera Gaming division. Engadget reports: Opera has bought the company for a simple reason: Opera GX. The gamer-focused web browser was launched in early access back in June 2019. Its headline feature is a slide-out control panel that lets you limit the browser's bandwidth and see which tabs are demanding the most CPU and RAM resources. Opera says it will create a new division, sensibly called Opera Gaming, by combining the Opera GX and GameMaker teams.

"We have always had big plans for improving GameMaker across all platforms, both from the perspective of improving accessibility and further developing the features available to commercial studios," Stuart Poole, General Manager of YoYo Games said. "And now we can't wait to see them arrive much sooner."

CNET reports: With the next version of Chrome, Google is moving ahead with a plan to improve privacy and security by reining in some abilities of extensions used to customize the browser. The move had angered some developers who expected earlier it would cripple ad blockers. Manifest v3, the programming interface behind Google's security plans, will arrive with Chrome 88 in mid-January, Google said Wednesday at the Chrome Dev Summit. Extensions using the earlier Manifest v2 will still work for at least a year...

Among other things, Manifest v3 limits the number of "rules" that extensions may apply to a web page as it loads. Rules are used, for example, to check if a website element comes from an advertiser's server and should therefore be blocked. Google announced the changes two years ago. Reducing the number of rules allowed angered creators of extensions like the uBlock Origin ad blocker and the Ghostery tracking blocker. They said the rules limits will stop their extensions from running their full lists of actions to screen ads or block tracking. That could let websites bypass extensions — and the preferences of people who installed them...

The shift brought on by Manifest V3 will spread to all browsers, to the detriment of ad blocking software, predicted Andrey Meshkov, co-founder and chief technology officer of AdGuard, an ad-blocking extension... Ghostery is working to update its extension for Manifest V3 but would rather spend its time on "real privacy innovations," President Jeremy Tillman said in a statement Wednesday. "We still have real misgivings that these changes have more to do with Google protecting its bottom line than it does with improving security for Chrome users...."

The importance of the Chrome team's choices are magnified by the fact that other browsers, including Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi , Opera and Brave, are built on its Chromium open-source foundation. Microsoft said it will embrace Manifest v3, too.
"Another Manifest v3 change is that extensions no longer may update their abilities by downloading code from third-party sites.

"The entire extension now must be distributed through the Chrome Web Store, a measure Google says improves security screens and speeds reviews."

In a report published today by cyber-security firm Rapid7, the company said it worked with Pakistani security researcher Rafay Baloch to disclose ten new address bar spoofing vulnerabilities across seven mobile browser apps. From a report: Impacted browsers include big names like Apple Safari, Opera Touch, and Opera Mini, but also niche apps like Bolt, RITS, UC Browser, and Yandex Browser. The issues were discovered earlier this year and reported to browser makers in August. The big vendors patched the issues right away, while the smaller vendors didn't even bother replying to the researchers, leaving their browsers vulnerable to attacks. "Exploitation all comes down to 'JavaScript shenanigans'," said Rapid7's Research Director, Tod Beardsley. The Rapid7 exec says that by messing with the timing between when the page loads and when the browser gets a chance to refresh the address bar URL, a malicious site could force the browser to show the wrong address.

Wired has highlighted several browser extensions that "are a simple first step in improving your online privacy." Other steps to take include adding a privacy-first browser and VPN to further mask your web activity. An anonymous reader shares the report: Privacy Badger is one of the best options for blocking online tracking in your current browser. For a start, it's created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a US-based non-profit digital rights group that's been fighting online privacy battles since 1990. It's also free. Privacy Badger tracks all the elements of web pages you visit -- including plugins and ads placed by external companies. If it sees these appearing across multiple sites you visit then the extension tells your browser not to load any more of that content.

DuckDuckGo is best-known for its anonymous search engine that doesn't collect people's data. DuckDuckGo also makes an extension for Chrome. The Privacy Essentials extension blocks hidden third-party trackers, showing you which advertising networks are following you around the web over time. The tool also highlights how websites collect data through a partnership with Terms of Service Didn't Read and includes scores for sites' privacy policies. It also adds its non-tracking search to Chrome.

The Ghostery browser extension blocks trackers and shows lists of which ones are blocked for each site (including those that are slow to load), allows trusted and restricted sites to be set up and also lets people you block ads. The main Ghostery extension is free but there's also a paid for $49 per month subscription that provides detailed breakdowns of all trackers and can be used for analysis or research. There are Ghostery extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge and Opera.

Unlike other tools here, Adblock Plus is primarily marketed as an ad blocking tool -- the others don't necessarily block ads by default but aim to be privacy tools that may limit the most intrusive types of ads. Using an ad blocker comes with a different set of ethical considerations to tools that are designed to stop overly intrusive web tracking; ad blockers will block a much wider set of items on a webpage and this can include ads that don't follow people around the web. Adblock Plus is signed up to the Acceptable Ads project that shows non-intrusive ads by default (although this can be turned off). On a privacy front Adblock Plus's free extensions block third party trackers and allow for social media sharing buttons that send information back to their owners to be disabled.