Staying Safe online and on Wattpad

Layer #4 ~BROWSERS (Part 2): Make your browser safer

We can start putting more sheets on the washing line of protection by beefing up our browser or activating its security features.

Working offline

Some people don't realise they can use their browser offline. Most browsers have a 'work offline' function in their menu, which means they can tweak the browser's different functions or read html pages they've already downloaded without the need to connect to the internet. With non-profit and security-conscious browsers like FireFox we can actually select an internet page, disconnect from the internet, and carry on reading, without the shoal of trackers and pond scum following our pretty little asses. If we have opened many tabs or windows or used the back or forward button we can still access those pages because they have been kept in the browser's memory.

Experienced authors actually save the pages by going to the menu on the browser and clicking SAVE PAGE AS and saving to a folder for reading later. I have done this for this book's research (and other books). This is a useful tip for my fellow writers. We must all do our research and we cannot spend ages on the internet when we should be writing the book. Making folders for a specific subject and saving internet pages about that subject is a more disciplined approach. However, if we want to click a link to a new page we haven't downloaded yet it will go nowhere. Just make sure you have all the pages you want or you will have to go online again.

Don't tell WP I mentioned it, but it's also the best way to download a story to read offline, especially if you're a reviewer like me. If I had thousands of followers somebody may object to me telling everybody about that but I haven't so it's our little secret, flocklings :).

Some websites are so greedy or ultra sensitive about being scraped by offline browser progs they will design the page to not work offline. I suppose I don't blame them, when we could download a prog to copy a whole website (check its source before you download). Criminals and plagiarists often do this for monetary purposes.

EG: when all our books, and the personal details we stupidly put on WP, were scraped last year and WP had to get their bulldog lawyers to get them all removed from a Vietnam server.

EDIT Actually this is still going on at the time of writing, The Vietnamese site has been redesigned and is still scraping ALL WP works. Hopefully this will soon change.

By telling you this I will annoy those greedy websites, data miners, criminals and advertisers, who want us to spend all day on the internet making them money, but tough sh*it. :)

SEE LINK 1 working offline

Clearing your browser search history and cache

One of the reasons we can see things offline is because online pages are stored in our device or browser's memory or via temporary internet files in a folder in our browser profile. Clearing our search history eradicates the record of our internet journeys while clearing the cache wipes out what we've looked at on those journeys. As @stevenpemberton, an excellent fantasy writer and IT guru, has said below, (check out his page by clicking his avatar), history and cache do slightly different things. If we do not clear them, both help us to recreate our favourite web pages more quickly and easily when we return to a site. But they are the prime source of income for snoopers who use sophisticated software and coding to look into our history for anything they can sell on. Clearing the cache helps your system to run faster too although it may take a while if you have never done it before. If you're worried about web pages you love not loading quickly after deleting your history, just BOOKMARK your favourite pages. It is safer and doesn't clog your system.

This link covers most browsers but Firefox has changed about 20 times since it was written, so you can find the clear cache button in version 42 by clicking TOOLS/OPTIONS/ADVANCED/NETWORK/CLEAR CACHE CONTENT (for FF version 43 see @michael1969's post below )