Firefox offers many addons and today’s users are more concerned than ever before about their privacy and security. These top 3 addons will help you protect and manage your privacy on the web.

NoScript

As many malicious programs find their way into your computer through scripts on web sites, the NoScript Firefox addon uses a preemptive strategy to block the most common types of scripts from appearing on your web pages. The user then may choose whether to include the scripts on any given web page. This technique is known as “whitelisting” a page.

NoScript has the ability to block Flash, Java, Javascript, and many any number of other scripts in web pages. It also has the ability to easily reinstate these scripts with the touch of one button on the NoScript bar icon.

https-everywhere

This very useful security addon gives the user the power to automatically encrypt communications with large web sites, many of which either do not offer the protection of HTTPS encryption themselves, or if they do offer it, sometimes make that protection very difficult to implement and use. These web sites also often default to unencrypted communication. It’s an unneeded hassle to have to turn on HTTPS, especially for web sites that are visited often by a user.

The program rewrites all requests to the web sites in question into encrypted HTTPS. Https-everywhere only works for sites that support HTTPS, but most of the major web sites on the Internet do support it.

BetterPrivacy

Better Privacy protects against a new type of cookie, known as Flash-cookies or LSO’s (Local Shared Objects). These flash cookies are very difficult to delete and never expire, allowing advertisers and marketers to track your visits across multiple websites. Betterprivacy allows you to manage these flash cookies by choosing to automatically delete them on a regular schedule or whenever you restart your browser.

=== About the Author ===

Mike Alvarez has a passion for promoting privacy online and firmly believes that everyone should use a VPN service to protect their privacy and anonymity.