Announcements and everything else related to Lightbeam

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

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

Today I'm happy to announce that a new version of Lightbeam is available. It contains some new features and several improvements. The release of this major version is also an opportunity to give you more details about what happened since I started to maintain the add-on.  Read more ...

A new version of Lightbeam will probably be available in this summer. More details will follow when it will be released. If you can’t wait to see how it changed you can take a look at it in the beta version.

Lightbeam is a tool which has the purpose (among others) to show that you need to protect your privacy. The add-on itself is also caring for your privacy and only saves recorded data local in your browser.

Gitlab which still hosts the repository of Lightbeam uses Cloudflare to protect its website from bots and Cloudflare makes it impossible to log in to the platform in some cases when you use a browser with add-ons that increase your privacy. That is the reason why I decided to move the repository of Lightbeam to a new home: Codeberg. Codeberg is maintained by a NGO and doesn’t use trackers, third party cookies or anything similar so it is the perfect place for Lightbeam.

There is already a repository for Lightbeam on Codeberg while the old one still exists on Gitlab. The plan is to replace all URLs on this website and in the add-on itself until the end of this year. Another todo is to create an archive of the old repo and leave a note so everyone knows that the development is taking place on Codeberg.

Some persons shared useful ideas how to improve Lightbeam on Gitlab and this release contains these improvements.

You can now filter the first parties by choosing different options in a new sidebar. These options affect which first party websites are shown. So if you decide to show only 50 websites this means that Lightbeam shows only 50 first party websites. Because first parties may contain a different number of third parties the graph could contain much more than 50 nodes. It would be technically possible to limit the nodes to a specific number but this would cost more performance, so I decided not to do so.

The drawing of the graph is an ressouce-intense process. If you recorded many websites it could even be that Lightbeam crashes. That’s why Lightbeam now shows a warning when there are more than 200 nodes.

Additionally to these changes there are more features. With the newest version it is possible to import data that you exported before. This is not only helpful to make testing of Lightbeam easier. It also gives you the opportunity to prepare some special cases that you can just import at every time and show to other people.

And there are other little changes:

• Data can also be saved in a fused version.
• Export contains metadata (e.g. version of Lightbeam used to export the data).
• Only “real” third parties are shown (before also URLs like abc.domain.de were shown as third parties when they were called from domain.de although they aren’t third parties in this case).
• The tooltip shows the number of requests.