There are many toolbars, extensions and plugins offered generously by security companies (like Symantec, McAfee, Dr.Web, AVG, avast! and many others) which check if a website link or URL is safe to visit in your web browser. They usually show a warning when you check a URL for safety. But why depend only on one of these services? To use more of these services, you can either install all of such available add-ons in your Firefox web browser, or you can just install Safe Preview extension which integrates many of these services into one place. The Safe Preview extension is available only for the Firefox web browser.
You can download and install the Safe Preview extension for Firefox from the Mozilla add-ons webpage. After the installation, you would have to restart your Firefox web browser before you can use it. Now when you visit a webpage, just hover your mouse cursor over a link and you would see two small icons popup next to that link. You can click on the icon with question mark to view the safety rating of that link.
This would show a tiny popup floating window which would access the rating for that web link from the six leading online security databases – Google Advisory, McAfee, Norton, Web of Trust (WoT), Trustware Secure Browsing and Dr. Web.
Some of these services would take longer time to fetch the safety data from their servers. For examples, the Norton Safe Web always requires captcha and does not seem to work. So if you do not want any of the slower services, you can choose which ones of them are used in the Safe Preview settings. You can also choose the icon display metrics and time delays in the settings. There is also a provision to whitelist some domain names so that they are not checked for safety ratings.
If instead of the question mark icon, you click on the magnifying glass icon, then you can view a preview of that URL. There are options to open the preview in the regular mode or the incognito mode.
As they say, it is always better to be safe than to be sorry. So if you want to follow the safe route to web browsing, then you may want to install a URL safety rating extension like Safe Preview. It can tell you beforehand whether a particular link is safe to visit or not.
You can download and install Safe Preview from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/safe-preview/.
Thank you