McAfee have a new Safe Browsing experience SiteAdvisor, which can keep you safe from spyware, spam, viruses and online scams.
SiteAdvisor was founded in April 2005 by a group of MIT engineers who wanted to make the Web safer for their family and friends. Having spent one too many holiday breaks trying to clean a mess of spam, adware, and spyware from our families’ computers, we decided to take action.
To provide a better browsing experience, SiteAdvisor provide plugins for both IE and Firefox. I have installed the SiteAdvisor Firefox plugin and I find it really fast and reliable. When you search with Google, Yahoo! or MSN, SiteAdvisor’s safety ratings appear next to search results in green if the website is safe, or in red if it is not but there is other icons if there isn’t enough information about it. I thought it will took time to check all links in a page to display safety buttons, but it was not ! icons are immediately displayed with results.
MouseOver on the McAfee safety icons will show you more details about the results, and you can then click on the different icons to know more about the security issues related to this website and the nuisance that could cause. But I noticed something for examples websites such Hotscripts are considered as not safe according to SiteAdvisor who reported : In our tests, we found downloads on this site that some people consider adware, spyware, or other unwanted programs.
In addition there is an option in the firefox status bar which change colors depending on the link you open, in the options you can view site details, settings, tell a friend, send feedback …
Overall, the extension looks very useful and could really provide a very safe browsing experience. Also I like the ease of use and how intuitive the results are. More than that, website’s owners can register in the website and add comment, this will help to improve results, fix problems and in the same time connect owners with SiteAdvisor website.
more information on http://www.siteadvisor.com/
