Rec: Ghostery Content Blocker
3 Jan 2017 01:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
promethia_tenk
Ghostery is like a next-level adblocker. It's an extension for your browser that can block not just visible ads, but all of the trackers and plug-ins that litter modern websites. Why would you want to do this?
1) Privacy: Pretty much every website on the internet is spying on you, often in sophisticated networks that follow you around the web. Ghostry helps shield you from these tracker networks.
2) Security: Some website plugins carry malware that can do you active harm.
3) Speed: A major portion of the data load of a lot of websites is in trackers and plugins. It's amazing how fast some of these sites load when you cut that crap out.
4) Clutter: Ghostery removes a lot of the extra cruft from websites that can distract from the content. Not just ads, but things like those social media sharing buttons, media players, and buggy, slow-loading comment sections. Now, some of these things are useful, but Ghostery lets you turn them on and off at will. Maybe you want the Facebook share buttons but not the Twitter or Linked in ones--you can do that. Maybe most of the time you just want to read a site's articles but sometimes you want to comment--you can load them only when you want to.
5) And it blocks ads too.
I actually run Ghostery and AdBlock Plus at the same time. Sometimes AdBlock picks up something that Ghostery misses.
Ghostery does take a little more active tending than something like AdBlock Plus. As I mention above, some of these plugins are things you actually want. Ghostery breaks the various trackers and plugins into categories like advertising, analytics, media players, etc., to help you figure out which. During the setup process you're also able to search for particular items if you already know you want them enabled (I rely a lot on Google services, for example, and much of the value they provide depends on them knowing that I'm doing, so I enabled their trackers out of the box).
If you're on a particular web page and something seems broken, you can click on Ghostery's drop-down menu to see what content it's blocking and selectively re-enable what you need. It looks like this:
The thing I end up needing to re-enable most often are video players. For certain page elements like comment sections, Ghostery will also leave a little ghost icon to mark what it blocked and you can click on the icon to re-enable the plugin.
Amusingly/of note, if you still use LiveJournal, you will need to enable the LiveJournal 'site analytics' plugin, as major portions of the system pages like comments, flist filtering, and many settings now seem to be tied to it. I'm not entirely sure what I think about this.
Before you install, it's also worth reading about Ghostery's business model so you can make an informed decision about whether and how you use it. Personally, it tend to put more trust in companies that are up-front about how they make their money like this.
Re: Would also recommend
Date: 8 Jan 2017 01:56 pm (UTC)Also am starting to get attached to this style. May keep it around for myself, at least for awhile.
Ta. <3 I was faffing about trying to get all the colours to match etc etc, and then decided to change the font... Which meant that now the writing was BIG. At which point I decided that I'd had enough.
Have been there. Sometimes you just have to walk away for awhile.
Actually, re: fonts. First you might want to go into your browser's settings and look for a setting for default font size (mine was, like, 16). Adjust that down and all of dreamwidth will look less big, not just your journal. The tricky bit is you will also make gmail smaller, so you have to cross-check both sites and find a good compromise. Then go into your journal settings and adjust that font size, if necessary.