New Microsoft Edge

There are other privacy-oriented Chromium browsers besides Brave, but their updates tend to be sparse and they have much smaller dev teams working on them. I’ve used two. One is the Epic Privacy Browser, which like Brave ripped out Google’s tracking code, and by default it deletes cookies, history, and cache on quit. It has a built-in optional proxy service that can be enabled at the user’s discretion, and “Ad and user activity trackers are blocked by default on Epic browser which prevents any user tracking to occur. The browser also blocks cryptocurrency miners from running on the users system. The browsers’ fingerprinting protection blocks access to image canvas, font canvas, and audio context data. WebRTC IP Address Leaking is blocked by default as well.” The other I’ve used is SRWare Iron, which is even less well-known, and appears to be sporadically updated.

For me it’s still Brave. Firefox is a solid alternative, and it uses many extensions for Chromium like Decentraleyes (which I discussed here). And Firefox has an equivalent to the Gmail tracker-blocker I use too.

But Firefox it has a relative dearth of extensions that I like to use, or find useful, like one that turns any web page into an ePub, or extensions that improve the UI and services or Flickr, Facebook, Reddit and Gmail, or revamp the YouTube interface and block ads, or tells me the fonts on a web page I’m visiting, etc etc. I have around 30 extensions in Brave right now (though I only turn some on, like that epub extension, when needed). Brave also includes a Tor browser (not something I use) and now automatically pops up a button to find an archive.org version of a webpage if the page is missing (aka 404 error).

A year ago with Safari 12.1 Apple disabled the ability to disable hyperlink auditing, AKA click-tracking. Although Apple implements protection against cross-site tracking, both Safari and Chrome also disabled the ability to stop click-tracking; Brave and Firefox still have the protection on by default. (And Edge? No idea.)

1 Like