People are spending more of their time and managing more of their lives on the internet, so it's little wonder that the web is a rich hunting ground for cybercriminals and scammers.

In order to make using the internet safer, Malwarebytes is launching Browser Guard, a free browser extension aimed at safeguarding consumers from scammers, and allowing them to browse up to four times faster.

Available for both Chrome and Firefox, the tool blocks pop-ups, browser hijacking and browser locking (including the popular 'tech support scams'), as well as filtering out unverified and suspicious content, plus unwanted ads, and ad trackers.

"One of the primary goals of our company has been to protect people from material they don't want on their computing devices. Today unwanted material extends beyond overt malware to ads and tracking tools that expose users' locations and take up their bandwidth," says Akshay Bhargava, senior vice president of products at Malwarebytes. "Malwarebytes Browser Guard gives users the freedom to take charge of their browsing experience without an onslaught of content or exposure to threats and it's a great supplement to our premium endpoint protection line of consumer products."

Browser Guard can be installed on student machines in schools via GSuite. It has a statistics page within the tool which gives an in-depth look at what users are blocking in real-time and what they have been protected against.

The plug-in also removes clickbait and all ads from any webpage, to give a cleaner, faster user-experience. You can customize what will -- and won't -- be allowed for each of the web pages you visit.

Browser Guard is available free now for Chrome and Firefox users.