Google put app developers on notice last week, urging them to comply with a new set of privacy policies designed to better promote transparency it plans on enforcing this summer.
Tag Archives: extensions
Can shopping extensions help you find the best prices?
Protect your privacy while finding the best online prices.
The holiday shopping season is upon us and shoppers are flocking to the Web to find online deals and coupons. Shopping extensions for your web browser can help you find the best prices, but how do you know you are finding a great deal from a SAFE and trusted retailer?
There are several shopping tools that can help you find the lowest price from around the web, but I’ll start with the one that finds low prices and guarantees the safety and integrity of the online shop – Avast’s very own SafePrice.
SafePrice find the best deals from TRUSTED online shops
Instead of visiting price comparison sites first, all you do is go to your favorite online store and pick out what you want to buy. SafePrice checks the price against thousands of verified stores, then displays the best deals and coupons at the very top of your browser. The bar is invisible when you’re not shopping.
Avast users already have SafePrice installed. If you are not an Avast user, but wnat to use it to find trusted stores, then add the extension to Chrome from the Chrome Web Store.
Here’s what SafePrice does:
- Offers coupons for savings on the same or similar products
- Ensures that you’re buying from reputable dealers
- Offers secure online price comparisons
- Highlights the best deal
- Provides easy customization capabilities
- Hides from view when you’re not shopping
- Offers deals without taking you to another site
SafePrice protects your privacy
SafePrice will never compromise your privacy. The specific products you are searching for and the URLs of the shopping sites you visit are communicated to our server. All personally identifiable information is stripped from this data in real time, so that the data that comes into our servers is completely anonymous.
Other shopping tools
InvisibleHand
InvisibleHand discreetly notifies you if the product you’re shopping for is available more cheaply from another retailer or travel site. It also shows you deals on hotels, rental-cars, and flights. Available for Chrome and Firefox.
Honey
Click on the Honey ‘Find Savings’ button during checkout and Honey will automatically apply coupon codes to your shopping cart. Available for Chrome and Firefox.
The Camelizer
For power-shoppers, this extension lets you track product price history information for items on Amazon, Best Buy, and Newegg. If you don’t need to buy the item now, you can sign up for price drop alerts via email or Twitter. Available for Chrome and Firefox.
RetailMeNot Coupons
For those who want to shop from their Android device (last year 53% of us did!), you can install RetailMeNot and search for the top deals and coupons from over 50,000 retailers.
Read our tips for safe shopping online.
Follow Avast on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google+ where we keep you updated on cybersecurity news every day.
Top 10 most annoying browser toolbars
It usually happens after you download something free. You go back online and your browser suddenly looks unfamiliar. There’s new buttons and weird icons in the place of what you used to have. A strange search page from a company you have never heard has taken the place of your homepage.
How did I get that annoying toolbar?
You have inadvertently downloaded a browser toolbar that came bundled with other software.
Free programs, like Adobe Reader, often include add-ons like toolbars or browser extensions. Most of the time, during the installation of the software, an opt-out option will be presented for the add-on. But, lots of people click through without reading, and when they’re finished they discover they have downloaded something they didn’t intend to.
To keep this from happening in the first place, slow down and read the screens. You could save yourself lots of time and headaches if you do.
What do browser toolbars do to my computer?
- Change your homepage and your search engine without your permission or awareness
- Track your browsing activities and searches
- Display annoying ads and manipulate search results
- Take up a lot of space inside the browser
- Slow down your surfing speed
- Fight against each other and become impossible for the average user to fully uninstall
In some cases, toolbars or add-ons can be quite useful, but Avast users have rated only 4% of toolbars as “good” or “useful”. The rest are “poor” or “very poor”.
The ten most unpopular toolbars are:
| TOOLBAR | NUMBER OF REMOVALS |
| Mindspark | 18,358,334 |
| Conduit | 13,924,453 |
| Ask.com | 11,773,062 |
| Delta Search | 6,136,056 |
| FastStart | 4,862,671 |
| DealPly | 4,253,676 |
| Yontoo Toolbar | 4,020,969 |
| SearchTheWeb (Iminent) | 3,442,706 |
| IncrediBar | 2,729,797 |
| Sweet 10 packs / SweetIM | 1,948,958 |
How do you get back your normal browser?
Avast Browser Cleanup has identified more than 60 million different browser add-ons and removed more than 650 million from users’ browsers in the past two years. Avast Browser Cleanup can help you remove annoying browser toolbars and regain your normal browser settings.
Avast Browser Cleanup is integrated in all free and premium Avast products. It can also be downloaded by users of other security programs as a standalone version.
Google introduce new Chrome extension rules to help protect users
Google has just introduced new rules for Chrome extensions to help crack down on unwanted and malicious extensions by only making Chrome extensions available via the official Chrome Store.
According to their blog post announcement, Google’s test phase for the rule saw a 75% drop in users complaining about unwanted extensions. Google wrote:
“We originally did not enforce this policy on the Windows developer channel in order to allow developers to opt out. Unfortunately, we’ve since observed malicious software forcing users into the developer channel in order to install unwanted off-store extensions. Affected users are left with malicious extensions running on a Chrome channel they did not choose.”
The move to a centralized marketplace for extensions is a great way for Google to establish quality control for Chrome extensions, just as it and Apple have with their respective app stores.
Chrome extensions are a great way to customize and optimize your browsing experience. For example AVG’s Crumble extension blocks online trackers and cookies allowing you to surf without surveillance.
You can install the extension for free from here: Crumble Chrome extension.
Checking which extensions you are using is very easy to do.
How to check which extensions you are running
Checking which Chrome extensions are active is quick and easy. Within Chrome, open the menu in the top right and select More Tools. Select Extensions from the menu.
Here you can view which extensions are currently running, add and remove extensions.
Google introduce new Chrome extension rules to help protect users
Google has just introduced new rules for Chrome extensions to help crack down on unwanted and malicious extensions by only making Chrome extensions available via the official Chrome Store.
According to their blog post announcement, Google’s test phase for the rule saw a 75% drop in users complaining about unwanted extensions. Google wrote:
“We originally did not enforce this policy on the Windows developer channel in order to allow developers to opt out. Unfortunately, we’ve since observed malicious software forcing users into the developer channel in order to install unwanted off-store extensions. Affected users are left with malicious extensions running on a Chrome channel they did not choose.”
The move to a centralized marketplace for extensions is a great way for Google to establish quality control for Chrome extensions, just as it and Apple have with their respective app stores.
Chrome extensions are a great way to customize and optimize your browsing experience. For example AVG’s Crumble extension blocks online trackers and cookies allowing you to surf without surveillance.
You can install the extension for free from here: Crumble Chrome extension.
Checking which extensions you are using is very easy to do.
How to check which extensions you are running
Checking which Chrome extensions are active is quick and easy. Within Chrome, open the menu in the top right and select More Tools. Select Extensions from the menu.
Here you can view which extensions are currently running, add and remove extensions.
Look-alike Avast Online Security extension deceives users
We have been recently notified about a suspicious browser extension for Google Chrome. Suspicious because it was called “Avast Free Antivirus 2014″, while our browser extension is actually called Avast Online Security. You can see the fake extension along with our official ones in the printscreens from the Chrome Web Store.
The extension looks professional featuring printscreens of the PC version of Avast 2014 and a good rating of 4 stars. It is so well-done that it may trick users to install it – and indeed almost 2,000 users fell for this.
After installing, the only thing that is added is the little icon between the search bar and options button, as can be seen on the printscreen above, where the extension is already installed.
Viewing the extension code reveals that it is surprisingly lightweight. It merely opens a new tab with a predefined URL when the Avast icon is clicked.
The website, fortunately, is not malicious at all, so there is nothing harmful to the user, other than deceiving them with a false sense of security. The author of the extension created many more extensions, each leading to a different landing page on the same domain. The only comfort we received from this malicious extension, was that our extension was the most downloaded one! That confirms to us that our service is valued (and needed!).
To get the authentic Avast Online Security app for your browser, please visit us on the Chrome Web Store.
Avast Software’s security applications for PC, Mac, and Android are trusted by more than 200-million people and businesses. Please follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.