Download YouTube videos to your computer, control trackers on websites with the Ghostery add-on, get search results for the United States or for France – this release contains great new features along with many enhancements and fixes.
What is new?
Ghostery – more control over your web privacy. Ghostery, one of the most popular anti-tracking tools, now belongs to the Cliqz product family. Read this short tutorial on how to install Ghostery in the Cliqz desktop browser in just a few easy steps.
Watch YouTube videos offline. In the Cliqz browser, you can now download videos from YouTube.com to your computer. On YouTube pages a new icon will appear in the browser bar. Clicking on the icon will show you the download formats available for the respective video. Learn more about this new feature.
Search results from your history, bookmarks and open tabs. Relevant pages for your search query that you have visited before are always shown first inside the results dropdown (if your history is remembered). In case you have visited multiple pages on a website, these links are now grouped and labeled “History”. In additions icons to the left of the links indicate if a page was bookmarked or is currently open.
Search results are going international. The Cliqz search engine has been enriched by indexes for the United States and for France. If you are using the German Cliqz browser version, you can switch to U.S. or French search results via the Control Center under “More search options”.
Report bad websites. If you come across a “not found” page or a website with inappropriate, adult or malicious content, you can now report it to Cliqz. Our team verifies all submissions. Thanks in advance for your active support.
Special offers when you need them. First tests for “Cliqz offers” have started. This new feature is in an early beta phase. It aims to show relevant offers to users in very specific situations only. The objective is to provide an added value while maintaining strict privacy standards. Learn more.
Transparency Monitor in English. Cliqz offers insights into the data that are generated with each search. The browser internal page about:transparency displays these data in real-time. We have now created an English version of this page.
What is better?
Update to Firefox 51. The new version of Firefox introduces some smart new details along with some improvements of the multi-processor architecture and security updates. For example, a little icon in the address bar now indicates if the current website is zoomed in or out. Another icon to the left of the web address – a struck-out lock – warns the user if they are about to log into a website via an insecure connection.
Installing LastPass. The password manager LastPass can be installed on Cliqz via the Options page (Preferences on Mac) Security. We enhanced the installation process by letting the LastPass drop-down menu open automatically at its end. This makes it easier to continue with logging into the service.
New website logos. We added a whole bunch of new website logos for the Cliqz search results. All logos next to the website titles and links are created manually. Website owners can contact us to request brand logos for Cliqz search.
Empty Anti-Tracking cache. If specific websites don’t display correctly, deleting the anti-tracking cache can sometimes resolve the issue. We added a button to clear this cache to the Anti-Tracking details view inside the Control Center menu. While this is a “power user” feature, pressing the button will not cause any issues but may well help solve display issues on a page.
Anti-Tracking and Ad-Blocking improvements. We continuously work on enhancing our technologies and included several minor updates in this release.
Control Center optimizations. Several visual enhancements have been made in the Control Center menu.
Focus on start page and new tabs. If Cliqz Tab is set as start page, the automatic focus is inside the center search bar to allow for an instant search or navigation while at the same time directing the user’s attention to the page content. For every new tab, the focus is set inside the address bar assuming that the user’s attention is to navigate to a new website.
What is fixed?
YouTube videos on Windows computers. A technical change in the YouTube.com platform resulted in problems playing videos in Cliqz on Windows machines. The issue has been fixed.
Search drop-down menu not closing. In case a link inside the search drop-down was opened by right-clicking and selecting “open in new tab”, a blank drop-down window remained open. This has been corrected so that the drop-down closes automatically as expected.
Top Sites on new tabs. On Cliqz Tab top site tiles that were deleted on one tab were still visible on other new tabs for a brief period of time. They now disappear instantly on all newly opened (!) tabs right away.
Gmail notifications on Cliqz Tab. In single cases, no new email notifications were displayed for the top site „mail.google.com“ even if they were activated. This has been fixed. Email notifications can be enabled by right-clicking on the Gmail Top Site and choosing the activate option.
Browser functions within the multi-processor architecture. We applied further architectural enhancements to proprietary Cliqz features, like Anti-Phishing or the on-boarding messaging system.
Opening Control Center sub-menus. Inside the Control Center in the “Other Settings” section, sub-menus did not open when clicking on the little arrow icons. We fixed this issue.
We are currently working on a new design for our search drop-down and have been testing various options.
Cliqz’s search has also been running as an experiment on Mozilla’s Test Pilot platform. A new version of this experiment is in the works.
Enjoy browsing with Cliqz. Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback.