Web browser privacy: Brave first place, Edge and Yandex last place

[Doctor Q]

This research paper by Douglas Leith in Ireland reports on the level of privacy in six web browsers, based on the information they send to servers, which can be used to track you across the Internet:

Web Browser Privacy: What Do Browsers Say When They Phone Home?​

Results:

The open source browser Brave was #1 for privacy.​

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Chrome, Firefox, and Safari ranked in the middle.​

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Edge (from Microsoft) and Yandex (from Russia) ranked last because they send persistent identifiers, IP addresses, and hardware identifiers to servers.​

Details are in the article and in a summary article at Ars Technica:

Study ranks the privacy of major browsers. Here are the findings​

You can limit some of the information-sharing by setting web browser preferences, but some of the sharing is unavoidable.

 

[Mousse]

I use Brave on my android phone because it has built in ad-blocker. I didn't know it was available for PC's. Gonna be my default browser on my work machine from now on. Chrome uses too much resources.

I used Edge once on Win10. Once. Sure it's faster and newer than Explorer, but it's infinitely worse than in so many ways.

 

[Doctor Q]

At work I use Macs and PCs and multiple browsers, including Edge for Windows.

At home I'll avoid Edge for Mac, for the reasons explained in this article.

 

[AidenShaw]

Brave is my favorite too. It's private, and so much faster than other browsers in part because it blocks the cross-site tracking scripts. It's based on Chromium, so most Chrome addons work.

Here's what it blocks on this page:

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[Doctor Q]

Brave is my favorite too. It's private, and so much faster than other browsers in part because it blocks the cross-site tracking scripts. It's based on Chromium, so most Chrome addons work.

Have you found any sites that suffer functionally under Brave? I imagine that it might block a JavaScript script that implements a feature used on the current page. And in your example it blocks a file at forums.macrumors.com even though that's the site you're on.

 

[Nermal]

Have you found any sites that suffer functionally under Brave?

I tried using it as my primary browser a year or so ago. I remember having issues with a handful of sites, but unfortunately can't remember any specifics other than the videoconferencing system we use at work.

 

[AidenShaw]

Have you found any sites that suffer functionally under Brave? I imagine that it might block a JavaScript script that implements a feature used on the current page. And in your example it blocks a file at forums.macrumors.com even though that's the site you're on.

Very few issues. Brave's analysis of scripts looks at the behaviour of the scripts - and has been getting better and better at identifying trackers.

There is an easy way to allow trackers - on the status popup you can temporarily lower Shields for the current page.

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In settings there's a link to report broken pages, so that the Brave engineers can improve the browser. If you lower shields, there's a "report site" link in the dialog above.

 

[Doctor Q]

The Ghostery extension has a similar approach, letting you can override the defaults for a page, but Brave's built-in features are a step ahead.

 

[velocityg4]

I wonder how Brave stacks up to Firefox when you use Privacy Badger and Ublock Origin add ons.

I use Brave on my android phone because it has built in ad-blocker. I didn't know it was available for PC's. Gonna be my default browser on my work machine from now on. Chrome uses too much resources.

I used Edge once on Win10. Once. Sure it's faster and newer than Explorer, but it's infinitely worse than in so many ways.

You should try Firefox on Android. You get access to the add-ons used in the desktop version. It's quite handy having a mostly fully featured browser.

 

[wellander1]

Wonder where opera or lynx would have been on the list.

 

[Tech198]

I would say any web browser you can install uBlock Origin on is equally just as good. It's just in the browser by default...

People probably tend to favor convenience anyway, which is i'm increasing starting to say "its one sided" as you can just install the required addons where available, into other browsers. (or if you know what to look for) which is always the 'key'

As long as privacy well-known add-ons remain "popular", it should be equal.

BTW, whre s Tor on all of this ? Isn't that supposed to be the "best" in privacy ? Givin by default its set up to connect using Tor network and others are not. Or is that excluded?

 

[MacBH928]

The results are very interesting especially considering Mozilla in NON-Profit and open source while Brave AFAIK is for profit.

To those who don't know, Brave is basically Chrome without the spyware.

 

[Doctor Q]

I spotted a rebuttal to the claims about Edge in the original article that I cited above.

 

[TVreporter]

Trying out Brave now on my imac - so far so good - pages appear to load a bit faster than safari. I'll continue testing it out. I removed Chrome and this can be my secondary browser if it continues to work well.

Brave blocked 6 items on this site

 

[S.B.G]

cgo is my new favorite web browser. It's even better than Brave and Tor for privacy and performance.

 

[kazmac]

Using Brave for me, and Edge for work.

I’ll continue to use Brave for my non-work browsing, really impressed at how fast it loads and how much it blocks.

 

[TVreporter]

I’ll continue to use Brave for my non-work browsing, really impressed at how fast it loads and how much it blocks.

Load speeds are definitely improved with Brave and the block count is large in just the 48 hours I've used it. Really enjoying it.

 

[korbs]

When I type in TOR we get more than one results - which is the most reliable - are they all based on TOR anyways?
What's your experience guys?

 

[Woodstockie]

I like Brave as a browser, but both on my iMac and PBook I have the strange thing happening that if I have it installed in my application folder, I am not able to share pictures from Photos by mail. Either the option is gone, or when Mail is visible as an option and selected, it will activate Brave. I delete the application (not the prefs or application support folder), restart Photos and voila, I have the mail option again. Anybody else experiencing this or has a solution?

 

[phillytim]

I will happily stick with Firefox, and can easily harden it with the likes of uBlock-type extensions.

At least I won't have a guilty conscience when Chromium monopolizes the browser rendering engine market.

 

[nickdalzell1]

I stopped using Brave and Tor when Cloudflare kept blacklisting me just for searching or browsing certain forums. For some reason, any site that relies on Cloudflare really despises user's wanting privacy.

 

[jeyf]

your security is no better than the extension(s) you use too