Introduction

Web browsers are the programs that we run in order to acess websites. With all of the data being handled by these programs, it is very important that you have a private, secure browser. Web browsers such as Chrome, collect a lot of very sensitive data on its users. Chrome logs the websites you visit, what you do on them, it logs your cookies, it monitors what you do so it can sell your information to advertisers, and much much more.

Firefox

Firefox has a quite a history of being a good, private web browser. While it is not the most private, it is still a very good browser. Unfortunately, due to some changes that have happened to the company that is responsible for Firefox, Mozilla, it is not as private as it once was, and is actually quite bloated. Luckilly with a little modification that is very easy Firefox can become an incredibly private, and secure web browser. All things considered, despite Firefox having some issues, and requiring modification to make it truly private, I would highly recommend this browser, with or without modification, to anyone looking to up their privacy, whilst still having a feature rich browser. It is more secure and private than most browsers, and is still pretty user friendly.

LibreWolf

LibreWolf is a privacy and freedom focused fork of Firefox. It is completely open source, and is community driven. It is a very fast browser, that is very customizable. It also supports all of Firefox's themes and addons. This is what I personally use as my main browser, although I have modified it in a similar way that I mentioned in the Firefox section. It is incredibly private even out-of-the-box, with no modifications, and comes with uBlock Origin installed. It does not collect telemetry data, is updated very frequently, and has been hardened to be as secure and private as possible. It also has several feature to stop websites from just being plain annoying, such as stopping window resizing from JS. All in all, I would highly recommend this browser to anyone. It is incredibly private, open source, community driven, and feature rich, while still being fast. It is incredibly well maintained, and very secure, with many features to stop websites from tracking you. It is a very good browser, that is incredibly user friendly, and is highly customizable.

Tor Browser

Tor Browser is the most secure, and private web browser in the world. It is based on Firefox, completely open source, and does not collect any data on you at all. It is also incredibly secure, and spoofs practically everything about your computer that can be spoofed. It is also the only recommended way to acess onion sites. You see, Tor stands for The Onion Routing Project, the reason it is called this is because of the way that it masks your identity. I will not go into the full detail of how this works as it is a bit out of the scope of this section, however I will touch on the basics. Pretty much, Tor sends your data through three nodes that are run by volunteers around the world, so that every site you go to can only see the information of the last node your data is being sent through. On top of that every node completely encrypts your data, using different keys.

It is next to impossible to trace somone using Tor if they practice good OPSEC. Besides from Tor letting you browse the web almost completely anonomously, it also lets you bypass censorship. If a country blocks acess to some websites, Tor is almost garunteed to get past that. However, some countries will try to block Tor itself, which is why there are Tor bridges. Tor bridges are exactly what they sound like, they effectivly serve as a proxy for the Tor network so that you can acess it undected. The only downside to using Tor is that it can be slow depending on how much the Feds decide to DDOS the network that day. I would absolutely 100% recommend this browser to any person at all. It is the most private and secure browser ever made. I do not recommend using this as your main browser however, as the security features break most websites. This browser is definitely something you will want installed on your computer, or phone, if you want to avoid censorship, or spying.

Mullvad Browser

Mullvad Browser is a privacy focused and TOR based browser. It does not use the onion network, but can be configured to route trafick through the Mullvad VPN. The reason I bring up this browser, is the fact that the TOR Project themselves say it is a good browser, I recommend reading this. It should in no way be considered a replacement for Tor, and is not as secure. It should also be noted that there is no such thing as a private VPN, as close as Mullvad gets. This is a good private browser, but I would spring for LibreWolf or a hardened version of Firefox before pouncing on this one. Still, it is a good choice.

Cromite

Cromite is a fork of the privacy focused web browser Bromite, and it is a browser for Android exclusively at this point. Cromite has taken the spot on this site that was previously Bromite's due to the fact that Bromite has seemingly been abandoned. There has not been an update since god knows when, and it is becoming a nuisance. I have however found Cromite, based off of Bromite and from one of the primary developers of Bromite. It is still reletavely new, but it is very privacy focused, and actively maintained. It has all o the previous benefits of the Bromite browser, being privacy focused, fast, a fork of chromium (an open source version of Chrome, which means it can use extensions), and built in AddBlock that works marvelously well. I would absolutely recommend Cromite, and it is my new Browser choice for Android.