If you’ve signed up for a reliable VPN service, you’ve taken the first giant leap into protecting your privacy. From now on, all your internet traffic from your device will be sent down an encrypted virtual tunnel to the VPN server.
Now’s the time to give some thought to your web browser. The right browser appropriately used can boost your VPN protection and prevent data leaks. The wrong browser can be a disaster for your privacy.
Here, you’ll learn about 5 of the most VPN-friendly browsers.
Brave
Brave is open source, being based on Chromium, just like Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.
Unlike Google Chrome, though, Brave has been built with a specific emphasis on user privacy. This means, for instance, that it comes with built-in ad-blocking capabilities, Brave Shields, so you don’t have to install an extra extension.
This doesn’t save you much trouble on desktop machines but the mobile version of Brave is very good for blocking annoying ads when you’re browsing the web on a handheld device.
Brave also comes with its very own search engine, which doesn’t log your requests or build profiles of you, unlike certain major search engines. It does, however, support making anonymous requests to Google if you don’t find what you need in search results.
A 2020 study found that Brave sent the least information “back home” from the browser to the developer’s main servers, such as your IP address and pages visited.
The browser supports connections to the Tor network and has its own built-in VPN. You can also install Chrome extensions, such as hide.me’s secure proxy extension.
Mozilla Firefox
This free and open-source browser is perfect to use with your VPN service as it has several cool security features.
These included protection against some kinds of tracking from which VPNs can’t protect you. For example, “Enhanced Tracking Protection” blocks known trackers from gathering data about your browsing habits from websites you visit.
Firefox also has “Total Cookie Protection” which isolates cookies from each other in a virtual “cookie jar”. This prevents them from interacting: for example, if you’re asking for a quote on a health insurance website, you don’t necessarily want them to know you just bought a book on how to give up smoking.
Firefox also has built-in protection against browser fingerprinting. It warns you if a site is trying to profile you in this way.
The browser also has a considerable number of add-ons, which you can easily install with a few mouse clicks. These include hide.me’s own VPN extension, as well as Firefox’s own “Facebook Container”, which prevents Meta from tracking you around the web.
Vivaldi
Vivaldi is a freeware browser, built with privacy in mind. The user interface itself isn’t open source but this isn’t necessarily a deal breaker as it’s very flexible and has some good privacy features.
Like Brave, Vivaldi is based on Chromium. It has an integrated ad blocker and can also block most tracking cookies. When you connect, Vivaldi does generate a unique user ID for your browser which is sent to their servers but they claim this is just to count user numbers.
During setup, you can choose from a number of search engines, such as DuckDuckGo, which doesn’t log your IP address or search queries.
As Vivaldi has a very small market share, in theory, this could make it vulnerable to browser fingerprinting, whereby websites build a profile about you based on your “user agent” data like your browser version, supported languages, colour scheme and so on.
Back in 2019, the team at Vivaldi fixed this by having the browser identify as a generic version of Chromium, which is much more common.
Pale Moon
Pale Moon browser is free and open-source software, originally based on Mozilla Firefox. It’s designed with privacy in mind, which makes it ideal for VPN users. It defaults to the DuckDuckGo search engine, so your search activities aren’t logged.
Since it was first developed, Pale Moon has diverged quite considerably from Firefox. It supports a number of older add-ons and includes a database of its own extensions too.
These include eMatrix, which operates in a similar way to ‘NoScript’, banning code from running unless you specifically enable it. You can also install AdBlock Latitude, which is a fork of the ad-blocker AdBlock Plus.
Pale Moon also has a smaller “footprint” than Firefox itself as it doesn’t include features like Pocket. This means it can run faster on older machines.
Currently, this browser is only officially available for Windows and Linux but there are ‘Beta’ versions available for both macOS Intel and ARM machines.
Epic Browser
Epic is a closed-source browser, based on Chromium. It’s been built with privacy in mind and keeps you safe in a number of extremely impressive ways.
It has extremely aggressive tracking protection built-in, which means that not only does it block most forms of trackers but it actively also shuts down cryptocurrency mining scripts and dangerous adverts.
Each time the browser closes, all your location history is deleted. This should mean that any cookies downloaded from the internet will vanish along with everything else. It also means that you’ll need to enter your password to log into websites each time you launch Epic.
WebRTC is disabled by default. This is an easy way for your real IP address to leak when using a VPN, so is a very useful feature.
The browser also blocks most forms of browser fingerprinting, such as the ‘canvas’ method where a website tries to draw an invisible image on your screen to find out more information about your device. The downside to this is that WhatsApp Web won’t work in the browser.
The only real downside is that Epic blocks most types of add-ons, supposedly for security reasons. It’s down to you to decide if its existing features are enough.
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