Welcome to
Lightbeam

Use the extension to see why your privacy is in danger.

One big circle surrounded by six smaller circles which are connected with the big one through lines

What is Lightbeam?

Firefox logo Add-on for Mozilla Firefox (Installation)
Codeberg logo Open Source (Source Code)
Recording icon Records websites and third party requests
Graph icon Visualization

Features

  • Recording of visited websites and their third party requests
  • Live visualization of recorded data as a graph
  • Export of the recorded data
  • Fuse Mode: Fuse multiple third party requests into one node
  • Search: Highlight nodes of websites and third parties containing the search term
  • Filter data by various options
  • All recorded data stays on your device
  • Dark and light theme
  • Languages: English and German

Latest News

Lightbeam Beta 3.0.10: Fallback settings (6. November 2024)

Publishing version 3.0.10  Read more ...

Lightbeam 3.0.9: Had to downgrade (8. Oktober 2024)

Version 3.0.8. lead to a memory leak  Read more ...

Lightbeam 3.0.8: Reset everything (29. September 2024)

A summary of the most important changes of version 3.0.8.  Read more ...

Why you should try Lightbeam

People who use a browser without any extensions often don’t have a clue what’s going on while they are browsing through the web. They don’t know that these websites are contacting other servers for additional ressources, tracking etc.

Lightbeam can show them that many websites make requests to the same third party and that some third parties - like Google - are present on the majority of all websites. This leads to the insight that those third parties know which websites you are visiting. What they do with this knowlegde - or data - is a different thing.

A little background

History

The history began as developers from Mozilla developed an add-on named Collusion. Interested people can find out in the source code that the development started on the 29th of July 2011. The first time Mozilla published its add-on was 2017. Since the technology inside of internet browsers changed over the years it was necessary to rebuild the add-on which was renamed to Lightbeam in the meantime. For this reason a different repository became the new home for Lightbeam (Github). Two years later the last contribution was made until the source code should stay untouched for the time being (Announcement by Mozilla).

The consequence was that Mozilla didn’t offer the add-on on add-ons.mozilla.org (AMO) anymore. This fact reached my - Christoph Klassen - ears when people at Digitalcourage talked about it. Since some of them used that add-on to show others what happens in the background while they are surfing in the internet I decided to revive Lightbeam.

Goals

One main goal is that people can use Lightbeam further. That means that I adjust it as soon as conditions for add-ons are changed by Mozilla. Otherwise Mozilla would throw Lightbeam out from AMO. The next main goal is to keep it up-to-date on the technical side so I will update the libraries, replace deprecated methods and so on.

New features don’t belong to the most important goals but few people requested new features and I implemented them because they are useful additions to the add-on. The fuse mode is one of those features. As long as there are only requests every now and then I will keep integrating new things into Lightbeam. Please don’t hesitate to create an issue on Codeberg or to write an email to me about your ideas!

Articles about Lightbeam