GOOGLE CHROME
Let’s start with the big one, chances are you may be using it to browse this website as you read this.
Google products are wolves in sheep clothing, if wolves were spyware. On some operative systems chrome even disables extensions that are not hosted on the official chrome extension repo, so if google doesn’t give the ok, they are censored. Source.
Furthermore, google chrome has mandatory DRM baked in. Source.
As a company in general, google is quite dangerous, a lot of other things will go over this in another page (yet to be written at the time of me posting this one), but it’s a horrible company to use if you value your privacy, chrome was even found to store data of users browsing in incognito mode, this was made clear when google agreed to delete billions of records collected from users using incognito mode, and while they may have deleted those, I hope we can agree that a company that did it in the first place and had to be taken to court to delete that data is not a trustworthy company.
Google chrome also makes ad-blocking less reliable, and why wouldn’t they, since they are a company that makes a lot of money through advertisement?
MOZILLA FIREFOX
Firefox used to be my browser of choice, sadly I had to move away from it. The terms of use and privacy notice were updated last year showing they were no longer committed to privacy, if they every truly were.
Furthermore, firefox now has baked in AI, I am unsure if that can be removed/disabled since I bailed before that happened, but since there are safer alternatives, there is no point in trying to stick with mozilla ff.
It is also believed that now mozilla uses anything you may type into firefox to train llms.
Mozilla is also now likely selling users data to ads companies since as you can see from this link they removed from their frequently asked questions if firefox sells personal data. Before, their answer to that question was “Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise.” This is just like how google’s company motto USED to be don’t be evil.
APPLE SAFARI
Apple claims to care for their users privacy a big deal, however they sell their users data harvested from safari to tencent.
Safari also down’t allow installing plugins/addons as far as I know, limiting greatly how users can customize their browsing experience, but that’s the apple standard, they know best and users shouldn’t even try to customize their experience more than swapping wallpapers.
BRAVE BROWSER
On paper the brave browser seems great, a browser you can use without having to worry about setting up an adblocker? Cool!
However, personally I am not too quick to trust something and, if they break my trust, it’s even harder to give it back. I never gave brave my trust but if I ever did, these are reasons why I wouldn’t trust them again.
They planned to replace ads with their own at some point. which is pretty much theft, if I own a website and place ads on it the reason is that I earn money, if a browser replaces those ads with their own they use my work to make money out of it and removing the chance for me to make money out of it. I am not fond of ads, even if I think they can be made in an ethical way, but this is the absolute worst way to go about removing them.
They were forcingly replacing wikipedia search results with their own fork of it.
They were caught injecting links with their affiliate codes.
They were caught sneaking an installation of a paid vpn service without users consent.
Brave’s CEO is a piece of work and while this isn’t related to privacy and software, I know many would prefer not to support someone like him by using his products.
Here’s another blog post about this topic
Mullvad browser was formerly in the alternatives section, I decided to downgrade it here because some, myself included, prefer to not give money if they go to fascists, the cofunder of mullvad is funding a far right party.
ANY CHROMIUM BASED BROWSER
Regardless of them being or not being in this list, if it’s a chromium based browser you shouldn’t trust it, the code was still writtem by google and they may have baked some garbage into it.
Have a look at this thread and see the shit chromium did, not even google chrome, just chromium. I am told that this type of scenario happened multiple times, remember what I mentioned earlier about trust being difficult to be given again?
ALTERNATIVES
Librewolf is a privacy focused browser, it is a fork of firefox and they work hard to turn firefox back into what they used to promise it would be.
Zen browser is another firefox fork, it has a beautiful UI, supports firefox addons, including the adblocker ublock origin that chrome doesn’t support anymore and while less privacy focused than librewolf, it is a better option than the browsers in the list above.
Palemoon browser is a browser made by people that could smell something was going bad in mozilla ages ago and hard forked it, palemoon is now it’s own thing, even if it does have some firefox vibes yet. It’s still updated, even if it looks dated.
Tor Browser is hands down the best option for privacy. It may break some websites but it ensures privacy and anonymity. Some people may find it spooky exclusively for the fact that it’s the dark web browser, but the dark web is, probably, the last bastion of freedom we have online.
Notable mentions: These are not for everyone but should you want to look into some very basic browsers you can have a look at dillo and links, though they do lack a lot of basic features modern browsers have.
HELP ME CONTINUE THIS LIST
Please, if you have something to add, let me know. Get in touch with me through email.