Which web browser should you be using?

It’s been a long-time coming, but it’s time to switch to a privacy-focused browser

Some of the most popular browsers in the world are being exposed for buying and selling user data or lacking adequate security measures. We’ll be looking at some popular browsers’ speed, privacy features and convenience and working out which ones are the best to use.

We’ll also let you know:

• what each browser does with your data ✔️
• how to delete your data from them ✔️
• how easy it is to switch from your browser to them ✔️
• how much we recommend using them in our Rightly rating ✔️

Delete your data from internet browsers

⚠️ Remember: although we'll tell you the standard steps to delete your data from any browser, no browser is completely foolproof. We recommend a look at our article about having more control over your data if you want some additional ways to secure your data across any browser.

Just to make something a little clearer... a browser is a way for you to access the internet (Chrome, Firefox, Safari/all of the ones we’ve talked about) and a search engine is a way for you to browse content on the internet once you have access to it (Google, Bing, Yahoo). So, on a browser you would type in keywords or a question, as soon as you click ‘search’ the search engine kicks in and looks through its index for relevant web pages/URLs to display to you. These results show up on the browser again so you can look through them and click on the web page you want.

Before we start, we may say that a browser is Chromium based, this means that a browser has been built using the basic structure of Google’s open-source software (‘open-source’ means a browser can be scrutinised by anyone for hidden vulnerabilities and any malicious code). Chromium is fast and has a vast library of extensions, but it has a high RAM consumption (memory usage), doesn’t update automatically and isn’t privacy focused.

Chromium based: Opera, Edge, Chrome, Brave, Epic

Not Chromium based: Tor, Safari, Mozilla

Let us know what you think, or if you have any questions please get in touch: we'd love to hear from you!