Dethe

Yes, Lightbeam is different. It is more of an educational tool about visualizing third party sites that get loaded, and does not block anything by default.

When you visit a site in your browser, that site may load content from many other domains, which is basically invisible to you. Lightbeam lets you see those interconnections by visualizing all of the connections between different sites.

What you can do with the information is up to you, but one of the best things you can do is to share your connection data (we save very little about the connection, and attempt to strip all personal information away) to help us build an open, public database of third party connections to help further privacy research, and support tech/policy decisions. You can also use Lightbeam to watch sites (they will be displayed differently in the visualizations), hide sites (if you don't want them to show in visualizations), and block sites (the browser will no longer load any content from that site).

It does have an option to block domains, if you feel that they are trackers. Lightbeam does not do any block anything, but in the List View you can choose to block a domain. Be careful with this feature though, because you will prevent all traffic to that site from Firefox (until/unless you unblock it).

No, this is not really what Lightbeam is for.

That was a big part of what we're trying to address in this release. We rewrote big parts of the graph rendering and provide filters to reduce how many nodes get rendered.

It is still slow to switch from one visualization to another if you have a lot of data, which we'll be working on speeding up. There are other performance improvements we want to make, but it's already a lot faster than it was.

If you're still seeing it really slow down your browser, you can also file a bug and we'll look into it.