The people behind Ghostery have put together a list of the 100 most common tracking elements that their plugin picks up.
It's not only interesting to see all of the means of tracking out there at the moment, it's also interesting to see who occupies the top two spots. I know that they say that that they are trustworthy, but some aren't so sure, while others can't be bothered.
Chrome's original minimalism of having a default look lacking bookmark and menu toolbars has been mimicked by all of the major browser now. Not to be outdone, Chrome now looks to reduce the browser's non-content area even further by removing the address bar with its new compact view. If you have a recent Chromium or Chrome Dev release you can enable the new view of the about:flags screen.
What's next? Auto-hiding the remaining bit's of Chrome's chrome? I'm all for minimalism, but there might be a point where having some permanent interface elements might be useful. For one, it would appear as if the removal of the address bar would make phishing easier, since there is no way quickly check or monitor the domain of the sire you're currently visiting.
With version 8 Internet Explorer shipped with a built-in list of sites to be displayed in a non-standards, Compatibility View mode. This Compatibility View List identified sites that were "most likely to be displayed better in Compatibility View." While the all of the hubbub about whether or not Microsoft's implementation sucked any less than the previously common Doctype Switching technique for switching browsers' rendering modes was interesting reading, just reviewing the Compatibility View list was almost as equally entertaining.
Anyway, IE 9 has continued to implement Compatibility View, and this time the list of non-compatible sites is now web-accessible. happy reading. Oh, if your site is erroneously on the list just email iepo@microsoft.com to get it removed.
