The paper lumps Safari, Firefox, and Chrome together in the second band. This means it doesn’t remember your identifier across browser restarts.

Brave gets the top class all to itself because it uses what the study calls ‘ephemeral’ identifiers that link a handful of transmissions and then reset. The study placed browsers in one of three privacy classes, based on the time span over which they retain identifiers. Brave, which has accused Google of privacy violations, is “by far the most private of the browsers studied” when used with its out of the box settings, according to the paper. It also explored what the browser did when it was idle.Įven though Mozilla makes a talking point of privacy in Firefox, it was Brave, developed by Mozilla’s founder (and creator of JavaScript) Brendan Eich, that won out. To do this, it looked at the data shared on startup after a fresh install, on a restart, and after both pasting and typing a URL into the address bar. It used several tests to deduce whether the browser can track the user’s IP address over time, and whether it leaks details of web page visits. The study examined six browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Brave, Edge, and Yandex. Users looking for a privacy-focused browser might want to consider Brave first, according to a study published this week.ĭouglas Leith, professor of computer systems at Trinity University, examined six browsers for his report – Web Browser Privacy: What Do Browsers Say When They Phone Home? He found that Brave’s Chromium-based browser is the least likely to reveal unique identifying information about the computer using it.

Sites that came with brave search bar