Ghostery Usage Tip: Transfer Your Settings

Howdy Ghostery folk!

I hope everyone is happily browsing the internets. We have had a bunch of users ask if it was possible to export their Ghostery settings to other machines. I am here to say.. YES… for Firefox and Chrome [Safari, Opera and IE do not support this ability]. Our super cool developers gave me the scoop and I am here to pass the info along on to you!

Start by making sure you’ve installed the same version of Ghostery on both machines.

Firefox

1. On the old machine, open about:support in a new tab, then press the button that opens the Profile Directory. (You may now close this tab.)
2. Select Tools > Ghostery > Block Log. Click the Clear button, followed by the Close button.
3. Quit Firefox.
4. In the Profile directory, open the prefs.js file using your favorite text editor.
5. Select the lines that begin with user_pref(“extensions.ghostery. and save a copy of them inside the ghostery subdirectory as prefs.txt (Quit the text editor.)
6. Archive the ghostery subdirectory, and copy that over to the new machine somehow. (Now delete the prefs.txt file and the archive on the old machine, and close the Profile directory.)
7. On the new machine, open about:support in a new tab, and press the button that opens the Profile Directory. (You may now close this tab.)
8. Quit Firefox.
9. Delete the ghostery subdirectory.
10. Extract the archive you copied from the old machine.
11. Open prefs.js in your favorite text editor. Delete all the lines that begin with user_pref(“extensions.ghostery. and replace them with the contents of the prefs.txt file in the replacement ghostery subdirectory. Quit; save changes.
12. Delete the prefs.txt file, as it’s no longer needed. (Nor is the archive.) You may now close the Profile directory.

Chrome

1. Go to chrome://extensions/
2. Enable Developer mode (checkbox)
3. Expand the row for Ghostery and click on Inspect background.html.
4. In the Developer Tools window that comes up, make sure you are on the Console Tab.
5. You can export your site exemptions by typing: localStorage.site_whitelist into the console.
6. You could at a later point import your whitelist by typing: localStorage.site_whitelist = “[“site1.com”, “site2.com”]” into the console, where the stuff to the right of the equals sign is the text you previously saved from localStorage.site_Whitelist.
7. Restart the browser after importing your site exemptions to have your changes take effect.

For those of you who have your settings “dialed in”, we hope this helps you get Ghostery running everywhere you want it to be!

and as always… Happy browsing.