Firefox Link Extend

Martin Brinkmann
Feb 21, 2009
Updated • Jun 4, 2014
Firefox, Firefox add-ons
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8

If you are a cautious user on the Internet you may want to find out as much as possible about sites that you are going to visit before actually visiting them.

The basic concept of Link Extend is to provide a wide range of information about a selected link so that you can make an educated decision about that site without having to visit it for that.

It queries more than 20 different web services and displays the results in an overlay on the same page. Results are divided into different categories like Safety, Kid Safe or Ethics.

Each web service rates the link that you have selected. This ranges from low risk to high risk websites in the Safety category, safe, suspicious or unsafe in the Kid Safe category or very good and very bad in the Ethics category.

A total of eight different services are queried in the safety category including Site Advisor, Google Safe Browsing or Norton.

The other two categories make use of three services each like WOT, Icra or Corporate Critic.

There are various additional information which are mostly webmaster related like displaying the Pagerank, the age of a website or Alexa status.

Link Extend comes with its own toolbar and integrates itself to the right-click context menu on links as well. This means that the toolbar is not needed to use the Firefox extension, it does however display information about the current website which may be of interest to you as well.

One interesting option that is available in the program's settings is the ability to hide websites from search results if they have been rated.

Update: Link Extend has not been updated since 2011, and while most of the features work fine, some features are not working correctly anymore because of this.

The toolbar works fine for the most part, displaying information and links of interest. The overlay that opens when you right-click on a link on the other hand has no real background anymore. While you can still use it, it feels kinda weird doing so because of that.

The options that LinkExtend makes available are extensive. You can hide or display most information on the toolbar and context menu. If you are not interested in Pagerank for instance, you can disable it so that it is not displayed anymore.

Some of the services do not display information anymore as well.While you do get some information, for instance from Web of Trust, you will notice that others won't display a rating anymore.

The extension is in need of an update but it is unlikely that one will be release as the add-on appears to have been abandoned by its author.

The Web of Trust add-on may be an alternative, even though it only displays information about a site's trustworthiness and not webmaster related information.

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Comments

  1. kevin said on May 11, 2012 at 5:45 am
    Reply

    great …

  2. shensa said on March 26, 2009 at 12:01 am
    Reply

    This causes Symantec Endpoint Protection to through an error 21631 error about Alexa intrusion. The detection occurs about every 3 minutes and fills the logs. Don’t use these two products in conjunction.

  3. Mony said on February 22, 2009 at 6:14 pm
    Reply

    With these various checks I thought it will be slow. If it doesn’t, I am very eager to make a try.

  4. Transcontinental said on February 22, 2009 at 6:07 pm
    Reply

    Mony > It affects less my browsing speed (as well as my cpu) than streaming audio with XMPLayer!

  5. Mony said on February 22, 2009 at 5:26 pm
    Reply

    Will it affect my browsing speed?

  6. Transcontinental said on February 21, 2009 at 4:25 pm
    Reply

    Is the information retrieved on user request or systematically for every site, and, can the search engines’ provided ratings be disabled? The extension’s info lacks… information, as often.

  7. Transcontinental said on February 21, 2009 at 4:08 pm
    Reply

    Too heavy, far too heavy. And toolbars are invasive. Use OpenDNS as DNS resolver (includes website specific filtering) and a good Internet Security software should be enough. “Should” because even tanks get destroyed.
    This is only my opinion, of course

    1. Martin said on February 21, 2009 at 4:14 pm
      Reply

      You can disable the toolbar and only work with the right-click entry.

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