Lightbeam for Firefox README

This is an add-on for Firefox that helps to visualize sites that may be tracking you around the internet. The add-on is available from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lightbeam/.

Prerequisites

• Mozilla Add-on SDK
• Firefox 18 or higher.

If you only want to see the demo, you don't need any of these; all you need is a modern browser.

Quick Start

First, install the Mozilla Add-on SDK if you haven't already. We recommend using the latest development version, which you can simply clone from Github.

Once it's installed, activate it in a command line terminal:

cd addon-sdk
source bin/activate

Then, check out the Lightbeam repository and enter it (do this where you want the lightbeam directory, not in the addon-sdk directory):

git clone git://github.com/mozilla/lightbeam.git
cd lightbeam

Finally, run:

cfx run

This will start Firefox with a temporary profile that has Lightbeam installed. Just click on the Lightbeam icon at the bottom-right of the browser window to open the web front-end.

At this point, any changes you make to the web front-end simply require reloading the tab containing it. Changing the add-on, however, will require quitting Firefox and running cfx run again.

Software Used

The following software is bundled with the repository and doesn't need to be manually obtained.

• D3

• PicoModal

• parseUri