Download Ghostery 7.0.0

Version 7.0 of Ghostery has been released. Ghostery is a browser add-on that provides insight into trackers present on web pages. These are used, among other things, for visitor statistics and direct marketing. It is also possible to block these trackers, which benefits, among other things, privacy and loading times. The addon is available for Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, Android and iOS. Version 7 is currently only available for the desktop version of Chrome, but other browsers should follow soon. The release notes for this release are as follows:

Ghostery 7 is Here
We are pleased to announce the release of Ghostery 7, the long-awaited and newest edition of our free browser extension. Ghostery gives you the tools to see, understand, and block/unblock tracking technologies (called trackers) on the sites you visit, giving you a cleaner, faster, and safer browsing experience.

Ghostery 7 was designed and developed using the tremendous feedback we have received from our vibrant community, including months of user testing, hundreds of emails to our support desk, and thousands of survey responses. All sorts of users – from first time users to casual users to experts – wanted a browser extension that fit their individual needs and levels of use. Well, we heard you loud and clear! The result is an extension that combines a cleaner, simpler, and easier-to-understand interface with powerful new and enhanced features, the best of both worlds. The browser extension provides greater insight into trackers and the websites that host them.

If you’d like to try Ghostery 7 for yourself, it is available for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera today and will be coming soon to Edge. If you’d like to learn more, let’s break down what is new in Ghostery 7.

Improved UI
With Ghostery 7, we created a user interface that is simple and easy to understand for beginners, but that still offers advanced functionality and data points for more knowledgeable users. To achieve this, we did two things. First, we increased the size of the panel to give us more real estate to show information, while still keeping the interface clean. Second, we divided the extension into a right-side information pane, with our granular list of trackers, and a collapsable left-side summary pane, with high-level information and functionality.

The information pane shows a cleaner, more compact version of our classic tracker list. This groups the trackers into high-level categories such as Advertising and Site Analytics, making it easier for a user to quickly learn about the different trackers on a page. In this list, users can block and unblock trackers across the web or on specific pages, as well as get additional detail and information for each tracker. Additionally, users can collapse the information panel if they want to hide this information. The summary panel features a colored tracker donut that gives a visual overview of how many trackers are in each category, while also doubling as a click-to-select filter for the tracker list. It also includes page-level actions such as Trust Site (unblock all on site) and Restrict Site (block all on site), as well as Pause Ghostery, which disables all blocking. The summary view makes it easier for beginners and more casual users to manage their preferences from one site to the next.

Enhanced Features for Account Holders
If you’re keen on getting a little more juice out of Ghostery 7, you can access enhanced features and functionality by creating an account. These features include:

• The ability to sync settings across browsers and devices
• Alerts for slow and non-secure trackers
• Detected URLs for each tracker, a feature that provides additional intelligence and insight for the power user
• A sneak peek at our Trackermap product; with one free scan a month, users can visually map all the tracker relationships on a page for greater insight

Tracker Alerts
Time and time again, we heard from our users that they needed help deciding what to block and when. To provide this much-needed help, we are proud to introduce alerts for broken-pages, and slow and non-secure trackers. Broken page alerts will let users know when they’re blocking a tracker that might be necessary for the website to work properly. Slow and non-secure tracker alerts (available to account holders) will let users know when a tracker is either slowing a site down or making a nonsecure call from a secure page. These alerts allow users to make informed decisions about what to block and when.

Improved Purple Box
Nothing polarizes our user base like the purple box, the real-time list of trackers that populates on the lower right-hand corner of the screen. A lot of users love it and a lot of users hate it. With Ghostery 7, we think the purple box is now easier to love and harder to hate, with a new UI that lets a user quickly collapse it or hide it when they don’t want it and expand it when they want to dig in and get additional information. For those that never want to see it, it’s easy to disable the purple box from the settings within the extension itself.

Other Features
Additional features that we think some users will find helpful – and don’t want to get lost in the flurry of new stuff – include:

• Local settings directly in the extension itself, which means that users no longer have to navigate to a web UI if they want to change their preferences.
• Links in the menu to submit new trackers and report broken pages with just one click, making it easier for our community of passionate users to help us make Ghostery even better.