Writers rely on their knowledge, experience, and the research they do. In terms of research, many if not most of us rely heavily on the Internet. I am not telling you anything new; right? In pointing out the obvious, I also want to point out that your browsing experiences can be both pleasant and secure. Pleasant, in terms of the look and feel of the software we use – enter here the Web browser – and secure, in terms of what information about your browsing experience is being recorded.
What is your favourite Web browser? What do you use to explore the Internet?
Before I share with you what my favourite Web browser is – actually, what my favourite Web browsers are – I want to introduce the subject of browsing privacy and security. Even if you take steps to cover your Internet tracks, the websites you have visited, the “cookies” those websites collect and that your computer remembers, some search engines may still track your searches.
I use several browsers, and I am constantly looking for improvements, refinements, features, and, yes, even new Web browsers. Though a memory hog, my favourite Web browser is Google Chrome. It is fairly quick and offers just about every feature and browser extension or add-on that’s out there.
The above said I use many other browsers. Recently, I have returned to using Mozilla Firefox. The reason I returned to Firefox was the release of their new Quantum browser. I had stopped using Firefox because it became very sluggish – for me at least. For example, its performance when I accessed Gmail was abysmal. There is a lot to like in Quantum.
Over the years I have experimented with and used several other browsers. Besides Chrome and Quantum, my list includes Apple’s Safari (yes, you can use it on a PC), Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and its successor, Edge; Opera; Vivaldi; and most recently, Brave.
I will get back to Vivaldi and Brave, and to a lesser extent, Opera, as I dig into the subject matter at hand: the issues around Web browsing privacy, security, and safety.
All Web browsers offer degrees and methods of protecting your privacy. Some of those you would need to ‘switch-on’ yourself, such as choosing private browsing, and others you would need to install, by way of browser add-ons or extensions. By privacy, I want to say there are numerous concerns: too many, in fact, to even touch upon in one article. These include less intrusive acts, such as search engines tracking your search history, or websites being aware of other websites you visited, to the annoyance of targeted advertisements, all the way to the potential threat of your keystrokes being captured. We need to be prudent, and careful, and there are many steps you can take to minimize distractions or risks.
If you are a Chrome user who prefers a little more privacy, open the browser, point to the Customize and Control Google Chrome button (look for the three vertical dots on the far right of the menu bar at the top), and choose New incognito window. Chrome will present you with a page that tells you what it can and cannot do for your private browsing experience. All Web browsers have a similar function. if you like shortcuts, you can right-click on the names of most Web browsers before opening them and choose to open a private browsing window from the get-go!
You have heard me mention Opera, Vivaldi, and Brave. Each of these Web browsers offers you a more robust privacy experience; each, in their own way.
I became a fan of Opera a few years ago. Originally conceived in 1994, it was purchased by Opera Software in 1995 and used a very specific interface (called a layout) until 2013. At that point, it copied the underlying layout of Chromium (yes, the folks who make Chrome), and was widely criticized for doing so. In 2016, it was purchased by a Chinese consortium. Up until 2013, it had won over a dozen awards. In my opinion, it is still a great browser. One of the features of Opera that attracted me in recent years was that its private browsing seemed different from all others. It features a true Virtual Private Network: VPNs as they are called. This ensures a much more private browsing experience, as there must always be some degree of authentication and encryption.
The folks that created Opera also developed the Vivaldi browser. I started using Vivaldi shortly after it became available. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Sure enough, Vivaldi was, by default, more private than other Web browsers. In addition, it was a lot faster. Sleek, different in design, and packing some unique features other Web browsers did not have, Vivaldi was a joy to use. It is even more so today; I will get to that. My only critical remarks about Vivaldi were that, in its early days, there were very few browser extensions or add-ons that could be found. For example, I have used an online password manager called LastPass for quite a few years, and it wasn’t initially available in Vivaldi.
The Brave Web browser goes several steps further in terms of protecting our privacy, saving us from annoying ads, and speeding up our browsing experience. I happened on it by chance. Brave has only been around for a couple of years. In their words, it represents “a new way of thinking about how the web works.” It is unique. It is super-fast. And it actively accumulates and reports on the time it is saving you, in addition to the number of ads it blocks. It has a clean interface. It was co-created by the person who invented JavaScript and co-founded Mozilla (as in Firefox). So far, my experiences with Brave have been awesome. I am beginning to use it more than other browsers, though I do switch back-and-forth.
Before summing things up, I wanted to get back to Vivaldi. Very recently – in fact, near the end of March 2018 – the folks behind this browser released an update to make it even more secure. (Though you have always been able to click the “V” in the upper left-hand corner, click File, and then click New Private Window.) Around the time I was ready to write this blog post, Vivaldi just announced its partnership with DuckDuckGo, a search engine company/service offering you complete privacy. This search engine does not track your search history. As I mentioned earlier, while Web browsers can give you Internet privacy, search engines don’t always do that. The combination of Vivaldi and DuckDuckGo represent a powerful one-two punch when it comes to private browsing.
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