Web of Trust add-on in Firefox for safe browsing

This page was last updated on June 13, 2010

Web of Trust (WOT) is one of Mozilla’s most popular add-ons. This safe surfing tool uses a traffic-light style rating system to help you stay safe when you search, surf and shop online.

WOT ratings are powered by a global community of millions of trustworthy users who have rated millions of websites based on their experiences. The WOT add-on provides reputation ratings to search results when you use Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Wikipedia and other popular sites, helping you protect your computer and personal information. Your online email account – Google Mail, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail is also protected. Here is how you can install this add-on and use it :

Visit https://addons.mozilla.org/ in your Firefox browser.
Click on the green Add to Firefox button to install the WOT add-on
Restart Firefox to complete the installation of the add on. Accept the EULA to proceed upon restart.
After accepting, you are ready to use it. When you search for a site in a search engine, you can see if a link is safe to click. The green links are safe while the red links are unsafe.
If somehow you happen to land on a harmful web site the WOT shows a warning and does not let you access such a web page.

You have to keep in mind, that the Web of Trust (WOT) add-on uses ratings given by the internet community. A great number of these users are not security experts and thus sometimes the rating of a web site may not be accurate.