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August 23, 2011 2:06 PM

Prevent browser/page hijacking - Safari 5.1?

Certain bittorrent sites I visit have recently become infested with page hijacking. You reach a page and a few seconds later you're hijacked to a spam page. It's very annoying and makes it hard to browse. What's the currently best way to stop this? Before this, I have not had browser problems for so long, I've not kept up with the latest spam countermeasures in, like, forever. I'm on the stock Safari 5.1, default configuration, up to date, but I have not installed anything (popup windows blocked by default); OS X 10.6.8 with all the updates. Or is Chrome a better browser here (I have Chrome installed but I'm not using it at the moment)?

posted by VikingSword to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

You could start with Safari AdBlock—but honestly your first line of defense should be finding better-managed torrent sites.
posted by bcwinters at 2:29 PM on August 23, 2011

Stop using Safari. It's worse than Internet Explorer in terms of security. Chrome and Firefox are better.
posted by signalnine at 2:48 PM on August 23, 2011

Firefox + turn on Preferences->Advanced->General->Warn me when websites try to redirect or reload the page; if that's not enough, add NoScript.
posted by flabdablet at 4:54 PM on August 23, 2011