Safe browsing for IE?

Are you worried about what’s beyond that link on a web page? Many people are worried about dodgy websites that might give you viruses or a ton of unwanted pop ups.

Hhott claims to solve this problem in Microsoft Internet Explorer, by adding a little icon to any link you roll over. If it’s green the link is good, and red means the link is dangerous. Further, if you roll over the Hhott icon, it will open a mini browser, showing you the content of the link.

The content preview is pretty slick, being smartly done and responding pretty quickly. Users of IE can use Hhott to save clicking forward and back while browsing. Using it in Vista there were a few occasions where the Hhott browser stopped popping up after browsing for some time. This could only be solved by closing and reopening IE, which is a pain.

In terms of safety, Hhott performs even worse. We tried links we knew prompted a swarm of irritating pop ups, yet Hhott’s icon was green, and the preview showed no warnings. Searching for unsuitable content also failed to get the red light from Hhott. While the idea is certainly a good one, it doesn’t seem to work properly yet.

In it’s current version, it’s hard to recommend Hhott, as its safety features are poor, and it’s preview function unreliable.