Tag Archives: browser extension

June 12, 2012, 2:11 pm

Browse Smarter with User Agent Switching

I have always liked the iPad’s version of Safari, and so have never bothered to explore the various alternative browsers on the App Store. But Safari does have a couple of drawbacks: it usually tries to display a site’s mobile version first, and some sites will block functionality when Mobile Safari is detected. To take just three examples: my credit union doesn’t display the required security code for login on Mobile Safari; Google Docs serves a mobile version, unless you choose otherwise; and, most frustrating for my purposes, PBWorks says that Mobile Safari doesn’t support editing online, and won’t let you edit pages at all. Since we use PBWorks for some behind-the-scenes work at ProfHacker, and I use it in most classes for my wikified class notes assignment, this was a serious limitation!

Eventually, this became too irritating to tolerate, and so I started downloading some…

July 28, 2011, 8:00 am

Use Collusion to Learn about Web Privacy

By Jason B. Jones

Cookies are small text files that websites store in your browser. Most of this is to facilitate things like shopping carts, or personalized settings for a site–for example, to identify subscribers to a news site, or commenters on a blog.

They are also routinely used to track what pages people visit, and in what order. Here’s Wikipedia’s explanation of how this works:

1. If the user requests a page of the site, but the request contains no cookie, the server presumes that this is the first page visited by the user; the server creates a random string and sends it as a cookie back to the browser together with the requested page;
2. From this point on, the cookie will be automatically sent by the browser to the server every time a new page from the site is requested; the server sends the page as usual, but also stores the URL of …