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Doctor Q

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Original poster
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Sep 19, 2002
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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:


Results:

The open source browser Brave was #1 for privacy.​
Chrome, Firefox, and Safari ranked in the middle.​
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:


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

macrumors 68040
Apr 7, 2008
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Flea Bottom, King's Landing
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

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Sep 19, 2002
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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

macrumors P6
Feb 8, 2003
18,667
4,677
The Peninsula
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:

brave.jpg
 

Doctor Q

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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

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Dec 7, 2002
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New Zealand
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

macrumors P6
Feb 8, 2003
18,667
4,677
The Peninsula
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.

brave2.jpg

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.
 
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Doctor Q

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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

macrumors 604
Dec 19, 2004
7,336
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Georgia
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.
 

Tech198

Cancelled
Mar 21, 2011
15,915
2,151
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

macrumors G3
May 17, 2008
8,734
3,895
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.
 

TVreporter

macrumors 68020
Mar 11, 2012
2,056
3,418
Near Toronto
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 :p
 

S.B.G

Moderator
Staff member
Sep 8, 2010
26,668
10,446
Detroit
cgo is my new favorite web browser. It's even better than Brave and Tor for privacy and performance.
 

korbs

macrumors member
Apr 18, 2020
38
11
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

macrumors regular
Aug 12, 2015
170
105
NY
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

macrumors 68000
Aug 12, 2011
1,784
1,272
Philadelphia, PA
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.
 
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nickdalzell1

macrumors 68030
Dec 8, 2019
2,787
1,670
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.
 
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