Privacy 1/6: Browser

Introduction

This series introduces you to alternatives to popular services. The alternatives are more privacy-oriented and often more secure than the popular ones from Google, Microsoft or Apple.
Most of these services are free and often open source, meaning that the program code is freely available for anyone to see.

Browser

The browser is probably the most widely used program, not only for browsing the web, but also for writing emails, chatting, scrolling through Reddit or watching videos on YouTube. As such, the browser is a critical part of your online life.

If your browser is compromised, hackers can still take your session token and log into your accounts without a password or 2fa. This can be very dangerous for critical accounts such as email, cloud or social media.

In addition, a website can simply ask for all your system information through the browser. So the website can often identify you based on hardware and software information. But it doesn’t stop there, many websites have implemented a lot of trackers, trackers, as the name suggests, track your behaviour and ‘watch’ what you do on the website. This includes what clicks you make on the site, how you move your mouse or what other tabs you’ve got open and much more.

Another reason to use a privacy and security focused browser is to block ads – almost every website has ads these days, and often they are full of them. In order to read the content of the website, you often have to “click away” several ads. To prevent this, you can install an adblocker.

Google Chrome alternative

As we all know, Chrome is by far the most widely used browser in the world. It has 65% of the browser market share (July 2024) [1]. The problem is that it’s developed by Google, which is notoriously not a privacy-friendly company. Chrome collects a lot of data, such as what sites you visit, what bookmarks you’ve saved, how much time you spend on a site, even what links you click on a site, and much more. All this data can be used to create a very accurate virtual character of you, which can then lead to the personalised advertising we all hate. To avoid this, we could use a more privacy-focused browser, such as Firefox, Librewolf, Mullvad Browser or Chromium. Let’s have a quick look at these alternatives.

Firefox

If you ask someone what browser they could use other than Chrome, a lot of people will say Firefox. Firefox isn’t like all the other browsers, it has its own rendering engine and isn’t based on Chromium. It was first released by Mozilla in 2004. It has always been, and still is, a highly recommended browser for privacy and security. However, Firefox has implemented many unnecessary features, Firefox is also funded by Google, last year Google spent 400 million to make Firefox use Google as the default search engine [2]. As a result, many people have abandoned Firefox in favour of a more privacy-oriented browser.

Librewolf

Librewolf was first released in 2020 and already has a very loyal community around it. It has become the new recommended privacy browser. It is based on Firefox, but has already removed all browser trackers and disabled many of Firefox’s “features”, such as Pocket, sponsored links and cloud sync. Librewolf offers great features such as the “Clear cookies and history when browser is closed” feature, as the name suggests, cookies and history are automatically cleared and deleted when the user closes the browser, this can significantly improve privacy.

Mullvad Browser

The Mullvad browser was first released in 2023. The browser was developed by the Tor Project team and distributed by Mullvad. It offers similar privacy and security features to the Tor Browser. The difference is that the Mullvad browser doesn’t use the Tor network, but is designed to be used with a VPN service instead. It uses the Mullvad Leta search engine by default, to use the Mullvad Leta search engine you need a Mullvad account, which costs €5 per month.

Chromium

Chromium was released in 2008. Unlike Chrome, Chromium is open source, buts its still beeing developde mainly by Google.