Ghostery?

Ghostery a must have add-on or a load of rubbish?

 

i don't think it is rubbish but not important for me

 

Like a lot of Fx add-ons, some people rave about it, some hate it. I'm just curious. I don't want to download it & play around with it for a while then find out it's hard to uninstall properly or conflicts with anything (like NoScript for instance).

 

if you have noscript, they are very similar, no need for both.

 

OK thanks, I've just been playing around with the Chrome plug-in of Ghostery in SRWare Iron. It isn't as fully functional as in Fx yet but it is interesting. I'll stick with NoScript in SM/Fx I think.

 

Not entirely necessary I guess, but still, its interesting to see what other scripts are running behind the scenes.

 

Ditto

 

I think it's a nice complement to NoScript for trackers on the main domain. For example if I visit NYtimes.com it loads the main domain and googlesyndication.com, linkstorm.net and brightcove.com. With NoScript I trust the main domain to ensure full functionality and make all others untrusted so trackers will be blocked. But there also is a WebTrends tracker on the main domain, Ghostery blocks this one without blocking the whole main domain
I think that's the power of Ghostery. AdBlock Plus has some anti-tracker subscriptions but every tracker on every domain needs to be added manually by the author which leaves a lot unblocked. Ghostery can detect the same tracker on every domain which is a whole better concept.
Other than that it's nice to know who is watching you and if you need to trust more than the main domain to make a site work you at least know which one's not to trust.
Since the new version it also has some new functions, but they aren't really interesting.(Delete flash cookies:Already have BetterPrivacy for that which is far more extensive, Delete silverlight cookies: Don't have silverlight installed anyway, Experimental detection of Web bugs embedded in iFrames and IMG tags: is nice concept but breaks lots of pages.)

 

OK thanks. I downloaded the extension out of curiosity. It is quite interesting & gives some information on any detected ghost feeds (which you can choose to block). I don't know how useful that info actually is though. The status bar alert count can be a bit sluggish to change if you are surfing pages quickly but you can hide that. The alert bubble is a bit better & you can hide that or set its time on the page (default 15 secs).