G Data CloudSecurity is a web browser protection plugin that is compatible with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. The plugin, which is also part of all commercial G Data security products, scans web pages for malicious activity and warns users if malicious activities have been discovered during the scan. Malicious activities include phishing and malware downloads, among others.

CloudSecurity displays a warning intermediary page that informs the user about the findings. The page contains a warning sign, short general explanation and options to continue loading the attack site and purchasing a copy of G Data.

One problem that experienced users may have with this approach is that G Data CloudSecurity is not disclosing exactly why a website has been blocked. The explanation reads:

Due to security reasons, G Data CloudSecurity has denied access to this website. The website is either infected or a phishing site.

The lack of detailed explanations might be reason enough for experienced users to select a different web protection plugin instead.

The plugin submits web site information to the cloud, where they are analyzed and returned to the browser. There is no visible delay in the opening of websites after the plugin has been installed.

Users should run a self test on first start which they can do from the plugin’s context menu.

Here it is also possible to disable the plugin for a time period. The plugin appears as a toolbar in Internet Explorer and Firefox. There does not seem to be a way to hide the toolbar in Internet Explorer. A click on the X icon of the toolbar leads to a prompt where it can be disabled and thus removed.

The always visible toolbar and the fact that explanations are general and not custom for each blocked website might keep most experienced users from using the product. Users who do not mind can download and install G Data CloudSecurity directly from the developer website. The program supports all versions of Internet Explorer from version 6 on, and Firefox 3 with support for Firefox 4 planned.

Xmarks, a company that is offering plugins to sync bookmarks between installations of Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Safari, have now announced that a limited beta release for the Google browser is available on their website. Limited beta in this case means that users with an Xmarks account can join the waiting list of the Google Chrome Xmarks beta plugin. They will be notified once they are able to download the plugin for the Google Chrome web browser.

The developers mention scaling and stability reasons for limiting the beta downloads in this stage. Google Chrome users who are interested in the plugin should sign up for the alpha on the Xmarks website. They also need to ensure that they are running a development build of the Google browser with extensions enabled. Several features of the bookmark syncing plugin are currently not included in the Google Chrome version of the plugin including missing support for custom bookmark servers, syncing profiles and the discovery feature.

Xmarks for Chrome is the first Google Chrome plugin that syncs bookmarks between different web browsers.

Image Navigator makes image browsing in Firefox comfortable. It is not the perfect solution and there surely will be some websites where the extension will fail to work properly. The reason for this is because Image Navigator is working with url sequences trying to find the next image or another folder containing images.

The extension adds one button to the Navigation Toolbar in Firefox which opens up a menu with two options that can also be selected with hotkeys. Next Image or Previous Image are the two choices offered. The hotkeys for those two functions are [ALT W] or [ALT Q].

Image Navigator prefetches the next image if one is found which means it only takes a fraction of a second usually to display the next image in line. The Firefox add-on is experimental meaning that it can only be downloaded after logging into the Mozilla website.

Update: Image Navigator has been discontinued. We suggest you take a look at the Image Tools extension instead which offers similar features and a lot more.