MetaScroll now supports Wikipedias protocol relative URLs. So when you are using an SSL encrypted connection to MetaScroll an go to a Wikipedia article from there, it will be SSL encrypted as well.
No chance for any possible listeners along your internet connection (educational facilities, employers, café owners) to see what you were searching or what Wikipedia articles you were reading.
Links to Wikipedia are now protocol relative
I totally forgot to mention: the shortcut for the web preview is Ctrl+Enter. Have fun!
Starting now, you find an new icon in the upper right corner of every search result on MetaScroll:
By clicking this icon, you can get a quick preview of the page behind the link, without ever visiting it:
This helps you find the right site for your search, without revealing your IP to different websites and multiple ad/tracking providers along the way. Try it out!
Technical details
This feature is implemented using the freshly available PhantomJS software. PhantomJS is basically a headless Webkit browser, which can be controlled using JavaScript. Wrapped inside a special little NodeJS webserver (for some caching and stuff), PhantomJS is used to generate the screenshot for a given URL, which then is delivered to the user by NodeJS. This sure will be the starting point for many other great features. Stay tuned!
Anonymous peak into search result pages
Good for those, who don’t rely on Google alone.
I just integrated the Viglink-service as an intend to cover the expenses necessary to support MetaScroll.
What Viglink does is, it tries to find an affiliate program for a given URL. All clicks on a search result on MetaScroll are now redirected via Viglink as a default. You an prevent this by unchecking the “Allow affiliate programs”-checkbx in the settings. Viglink takes the given URL, checks it against an internal database of given affiliate programs and performs a redirect via this program to the according URL.
MetaScroll does not give any personal data to Viglink (how could we, MetaScroll doesn’t store any personal data at all), but Viglink will save some anonymous identifier on your browser, to be able to determine a generated value, on which MetaScroll can participate.
I think the unintrusive, anonymous character of this monetisation is a good match for the MetaScroll service. And as already stated, you can always opt out of it.
