This Is Why You Might Want a New Internet Browser

Apple Safari. Microsoft Edge. Google Chrome. These three browsers dominate the browser landscape, and why wouldn’t they?

Just look at the company names attached to them. Apple bakes Safari into its Macs, iPhones, and iPads. Microsoft installs Edge onto Windows desktop computers. And Google wedges theirs into Chromebooks, Android smartphones, and tablets. Plus, an awful lot of people download Chrome onto their devices that don’t come with it.

But why? Market dominance. Familiarity. They’re pretty slick and often tie nicely into apps and operating systems developed by the same companies, again, because of familiarity. But all of them are leaky when it comes to your online privacy and anonymity. There are a lot of alternative browsers out there that deserve a look because they beef up your browsing privacy.

A more crowded field than you may think

Google Chrome is based on the open-source Chromium engine. Open-source means that other companies, organizations, and nonprofits are free to use the engine to build their own browsers, and most do.

To break down a highly complex topic, your browser, location, chosen time zone, font, browser window size, device screen resolution, browser extensions, browser settings, and more build what’s called a fingerprint that websites (and bad actors) can use to identify your web browsing.

It’s independent of your IP address, which you can secure with a virtual private network (VPN). Use a VPN, but know that it alone won’t keep you anonymous if you use a browser that waves around your fingerprint like a neon-light-covered flag.

Brave and Opera are based on the Chromium engine, so that many websites will work with them. After all, every website makes sure that Chrome users can access their sites; they’d be silly to ignore such a vast user base.

Brave constantly randomizes the small details that contribute to your fingerprint. It’s like yanking out a new expert disguise every five minutes. Somebody online trying to follow you would be thrown off sooner or later and lose track of you.

The Mozilla Foundation runs Firefox, which is one of the few browsers using a non-Chromium engine. It uses Mozilla’s Gecko engine. One of Firefox’s major attractions is its customizability, along with the fact that you’re supporting a nonprofit and not a major corporation.

You can “harden” Firefox by enabling strict security and privacy settings. At its stricter settings, it becomes quite secure, but it also tends to break more websites than Brave, in my experience, which is also ready to use as soon as you download it.

Mullvad and LibreWolf are based on Firefox, but with more stringent security settings enabled by default. Mullvad works the opposite of Brave, in a way. Rather than randomizing everything, Mullvad locks all users into the same settings, so everyone’s online activity looks the same. It’s like wearing a yellow T-shirt in a crowd of tens of thousands of others wearing yellow T-shirts. Those watching can hardly tell you apart.

The downside is that, while Mullvad is a very secure server, it breaks more websites than most, in my experience. And you shouldn’t change your browser settings or install extensions, because then your fingerprint would stand out from the crowd, nullifying its main advantage.

Once you pick a browser, you can use the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) Cover Your Tracks website to check your browser for information leaks. The EFF is a nonprofit that lobbies for the public’s digital privacy rights.

And although a host of companies introduced browsers built around an AI core, with more to come, these are not what you want to use if privacy is your first (or second, or third) concern. These include Opera Neon, Perplexity Comet, and ChatGPT Atlas.

They’re neat and effective at what they’re designed to do. Still, they work partly by learning from and tailoring their responses and behaviors to your unique browsing behavior, which means they collect a ton of info about you.

Oh, and remember that private browsing isn’t all that private, in actuality.