It’s hard to find a completely anonymous browser that works.
It’s not that you have to look far to find browsers that claim to be anonymous. Most of them are just sending a certain amount of unnecessary data around anyway. Others only work in limited scopes. And some don’t really work at all.
In short: Anonymous web browsers have trade offs.
What Is A Completely Anonymous Browser?
Because of the issues listed above, let’s define what we’re going to consider a ‘completely anonymous browser’, or at least something pretty close:
It works on the normal Internet: Tor and the Idyll project don’t count here, because they only work well on isolated networks. Tor is mainly ‘functional’ on the dark web using Onion routing. Idyll needs to be in the Utopia ecosystem. On the clear web, they’re either awful or they don’t work at all.
It isn’t part of a package of ‘chatty’ software: Comodo would be on the list if it didn’t force you to report user data back to the creator. It also makes you install a third party antivirus. Brave is just using Tor for its private functionality, and we already know how that fails.
That leaves two viable candidates. They aren’t perfect, or perfectly private or anonymous. But maybe someday one of them can become a completely anonymous browser. Frankly, just using a privacy app such as Hoody is better at this point. But let’s look at the field and see what they have to offer.
Waterfox Anonymous Internet Browser
Waterfox is at the top of our list. It has a lot of privacy and usability options. As far as an anonymous Internet browser goes, it scores fairly high. Not perfect of course, but at least it’s in the conversation.
Problem: In 2020, Waterfox was bought out by a company called System1. Who happens to be a pay-per-click advertiser. So there’s a conflict of interest there.
But even though everyone predicted the product’s rapid doom, it has remained pretty much the same. So far.
Waterfox has the same nagging issue that it’s always had: It requires data collection to be sent to the developer. It sucks, but that’s how a lot of projects get developed these days. The fact that it doesn’t have enough of a user base to make this optional is a bit depressing, but let’s move on.
On the positive side: Waterfox is fast, and has no telemetry tracking. Other anonymous Internet browsers mess up page rendering regularly because of anti-script measures, but this one hold most pages together well.
Maybe that’s because Waterfox is based on Gecko, not Blink or WebKit. Gecko is a layout engine that is used by very few browsers out there (Firefox). It tends to display newer pages quickly and accurately, but older websites might have some backwards compatibility issues.
System1’s ownership is a problem, if they decide in the future to add their own code to the project. Everyone is waiting for the other shoe to drop. But right now, Waterfox is the best thing out there. It’s not a completely anonymous browser, but it does well. Good enough to top this list, at least.
Iron Anonymous Internet Browser
As you’re about to see, the gap between first and second is pretty big.
SRWare Iron is an anonymous Internet browser that should be open source, but isn’t. Why? The developers have a problem releasing their source code. If you search for it, all you see is complaints and worries from the community that they’re hiding something. The project goes years without giving the public access to the source code. At this point, a lot of people have given up hope that it will ever really be open source. And if you can’t examine the code, that’s a major hit on the privacy side.
Because it means we have only SRWare’s word that anonymity is their chief concern. Unless you plan to sit there with a packet sniffer and do months of analysis to make sure nothing fishy is being injected into the packets, who knows what’s really going on under the hood?
Assuming you actually trust SRWare though, Iron is a fairly secure Chromium web browser. They removed DNS prefetch, search suggestion, autocomplete, Google Native Client, and the unique user identifier that other Chromium browser tabs use. That’s a pretty good list of features.
It’s not as fast as Waterfox. It uses Blink (a Webkit fork), which is incredibly mainstream and well examined. So less bugs, but also less browser diversity. It’s a coinflip as to whether or not that’s good news. There is a built in ad blocker and a user agent switcher too.
But is that enough? It’s been five years since this ‘open source’ project released their source code. That’s pretty fishy, frankly. Still, it lands at number two.
Other Projects
There are a few younger projects to look out for. They’re small, but on the PR side at least they seem to have their hearts in the right place. Now they just need to deliver a popular, fast, completely anonymous browser! It’s a tall order. But let’s see who else is out there:
Epic is working hard to gain anonymous Internet browser market share. It is packaged with an eight country VPN, which is great if you know how to use it and don’t set your expectations too high.
Here’s a strange but cool one: Tails is an OS and browser at the same time. It can be run entirely off of an 8GB encrypted memory stick, supposedly with no data leakage off of that flash drive.
And there’s Dooble. For them, source code and updates are hugely important. They plaster update news and repository links all over their blog, which is great for transparency.
None of these are quite there yet, but they certainly show some promise.
The problem being, as we saw with Waterfox, if they get backed by the wrong money their reputation will be shot. And as we saw with Iron, they all need to deliver on their promises of transparency, or people will quickly lose faith. Let’s hope they do great things in the future.