Uggghh. I should have known better, but there I was, staring at a bright-red screen in my Google Chrome tab that was trying to impress upon me—as much as a software browser could sans digital kick to the butt—that the popular tech news site I was about to visit was riddled with some kind of malware.

“Impossible,” I thought to myself. “There’s no way that this, a common site I frequent on a near-daily basis, could have anything to do with nefarious crap trying to install itself on my PC.”

Yes, the phrasing of my thoughts really does come out like that. So does my stubbornness. For rather than heed Google’s warning that the site I was about to visit was about to unleash a world of hurt on my system, I calmly told my browser that I was comfortable proceeding on my own (damnit).

I clicked the link, read my news and… was thrilled to find a new “Security Center” malware now popping up out of my taskbar about once every five minutes. Sigh. Before I could even turn to one of the many “get the heck off my system” tools that I keep installed for such measures, my entire screen went blue.

So, what do you use to clean your PC... aside from a baseball bat?

Oh, BarTab.  I wish I had heard of you before I switched over to Google Chrome.  As a frequent browser-but-not-bookmarker, I'd often load up my Mozilla Firefox browser with upwards of sixty tabs per new session.  Yes, sixty.  I'd use tabs instead of bookmarks to keep track of, "stuff you should check out later," only I wouldn't actually get around to clearing through this backlog of open links until days later.  I'm a procrastinator for new content, what can I say.

You can just imagine the performance impacts this habit had on my typical browsing session.  It didn't bother me that much, performance-wise, on my tricked-out desktop PC.  You can bet that my poor laptop wanted to fall over and die at the thought of having to pull up a huge list of pages each time I clicked on the little Firefox icon in the corner of my screen.  And regardless of whether my computer could handle the many, many tabs or not, there was still the issue of Firefox having to actually load the content of these pages before I could go about more browsing.  Little is more frustrating than having to wait five minutes just to check out a link that a friend sent along because Firefox has to take care of 60 other pages first. 

Ugh.

So how, then, does BarTab fix this issue?  Why is it a must-have add-on for your Web browsing?  Click the jump!

In this week's security-themed freeware roundup, I called out Mozilla Firefox for not being that secure of a web browser as compared to the virtualization-friendly Google Chrome. And that's still true. Unpleasant web sites can inject and exploit all sorts of nastiness in Firefox--not as badly as, say, the security lapses of Internet Explorer, but Firefox still contains the potential to open a door to your system's innermost workings. If this happens because of some hosted exploit or less-than-friendly extension you've downloaded, you're in for a world of hurt. Google Chrome, on the other hand, requires a separate exploit to somehow break its virtualization in tandem with malware that attacks the browser as a whole. The latter is doable, but the former is much more difficult to accomplish via web-based tricks.

So how, then, do you make for the most secure browsing experience possible if you're a die-hard Firefox user? Three words: web of Trust. This popular Firefox add-on uses the power of a five-million-user community, as well as a host of recommendations by site listings and phishing alerts, to rate the security of the web sites you want to visit. If you're about to step into a trap, you get a big, fancy alert window telling you that the site you're about to click on might not be the best choice from a security standpoint. In short, this is one of the most preventative techniques you can use to protect yourself against unknown web threats!

Read more after the jump.