Security company Bitdefender has releaser Bitdefender TrafficLight for Firefox 2.0, a security extension for Mozilla's Firefox web browser today.

The new version of Bitdefender TrafficLight for Firefox is the first version that is based on the WebExtensions system.

It introduces new functionality such as whitelist functionality and a system and design update among other new features.

Bitdefender Trafficlight

Bitdefender Trafficlight for Firefox is a standalone browser extension; a running Bitdefender security solution is not required to use the program.

The main feature of the browser extension is to inform you about the detected security level of web pages that you open in the browser.

This works similarly to how other security extensions handle it; whenever you load a site in Firefox, Bitdefender TrafficLight checks with Bitdefender to find out whether the page is flagged.

The extension displays a green icon for safe pages and a red icon for potentially malicious or risky pages. The extension checks each page for malware, phishing or fraud flags and reports its findings to you on page load.

Bitdefender TrafficLight displays its safety icons on supported search engines as well. It works on some search sites only; while you get the icons on Google Search, Yahoo Search, DuckDuckGo and Bing, you don't get them on Startpage, Yandex, or Baidu.

The extension adds the icon in front of the page title in the results. One issue that you may have with that is that this makes identification difficult on some search engines. DuckDuckGo, for instance, displays icons of the site as well which may lead to confusion and mistakes.

The third and final reporting feature that Bitdefender TrafficLight for Firefox supports is the extension's tracker detection feature. The extension detects loaded trackers and lists them in its interface.

The tracker feature is limited to the detection of trackers; functionality to block some or all trackers is not available.

The extension's settings page lists options to turn of any of the core features of the security extension. It does not make much sense to disable all three but you may use it to disable redundant functionality or features that you don't require. The Tracker Detector is probably the feature that is turned off the most considering that it is not overly useful (other than to reveal how many trackers a site uses).

You may add sites to the whitelist. BitDefender TrafficLight won't check sites that you add to the whitelist.

Closing Words

BitDefender TrafficLight for Firefox offers security readings for sites that you visit and sites listed by supported search engines. The extension is an informational tool only, it does not block you from visiting flagged sites.

The extension does display an intermediary page when you visit a flagged site. You can still proceed or whitelist the URL in question.

The newest version of the extension worked well during tests. The checking of individual visited pages and search results did not slow down the rendering of these pages noticeably. Some users reported higher CPU use after installing the extensions on some sites but I did not experience any of that.