The Best Privacy-Focused Browsers You’ve Never Heard Of
Reading Time: 2 minutesReduce tracking and improve your privacy with these lesser-known browsers.
There’s never a bad time to switch to a browser that respects your privacy more than Chrome does. For most people, Firefox or Brave (along with a few settings changes) is good enough. But if you’re after a browser designed entirely with privacy in mind, you have even better options than those, too.
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Of course, no matter which browser you use, you’re never going to magically disappear from the internet. But these four browsers start with privacy-friendly add-ons pre-loaded, and they claim to send no telemetry data as well. They’re great if you want to reduce tracking from advertising networks and your ISP, but not so much if you’re worried about surveillance from governments.
LibreWolf
LibreWolf is a Firefox-based browser with uBlock Origin pre-loaded. It doesn’t send any telemetry data back to its developers, and prioritizes privacy-focused search engines such as DuckDuckGo over the usual Google or Bing defaults. You can think of this browser as Firefox, but with more privacy out of the box. It’s available on Windows, Mac, and Linux, but you’ll have to manually download and install updates if you download its installer. Instead, you should install the app via repositories such as Chocolatey.
Pale Moon
If you want to try a privacy-friendly browser that doesn’t rely on Chrome’s Blink or Firefox’s Gecko engines, then Pale Moon is worth a shot. The browser is open source and says it doesn’t collect any data—something most browser can’t claim in their privacy policies. It works fairly well most of the time, but you may face certain issues like video loading problems. Pale Moon not a mainstream browser, so you’ll also have to give up some of the conveniences of using a popular alternative—for example, the latest extensions may not be available for Pale Moon, and your favorite add-ons may not work.
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SnowHaze
All iOS browsers are essentially variants of Safari, because Apple doesn’t allow non-WebKit browsers on the App Store. That makes it hard to justify using Safari alternatives, but even then, some browsers like SnowHaze stand out. SnowHaze has a built-in adblocker available from launch and claims to prevent all kinds of tracking and fingerprinting on the internet by default. The browser also has an optional paid VPN available, but don’t rush to sign up for that. You should do your research on the trustworthiness of the developers if you decide to sign up. We have a guide that helps you check if a VPN is shady to get you started.
Mull
Mull is a privacy-focused browser for Android phones. It’s built by the folks behind F-Droid (an alternative app store for Android), and its focus is on privacy. To start, you’ll have to download the F-Droid client on your phone and then install Mull from there. Once you do, don’t forget to install uBlock Origin for more privacy.