Epic: A Privacy-Focused Web Browser 223
Rob @CmdrTaco Malda writes
"I've been advising Epic Browser, a startup building a privacy-focused, Chrome-based browser that starts where incognito mode ends. Epic employs a host of tactics designed to make what happens inside your browser stay there, to the tune of a thousand blocks in a typical hour of browsing. They also provide a built-in proxy service. If the corporations and governments are going to watch us, there's no reason to make it any easier for them. Epic has Mac and Windows builds for now. Their site goes into far greater detail about how they block tracking methods most browsers don't."
Re:Chrome? (Score:5, Informative)
Based off Chromium, not Chrome. The first is open source.
Re:Where does the money come from? (Score:4, Informative)
Ads and search results never include any personalized results or tracking
So, ads yes, tracking no. Or in other words, what search engine ads were like before Google. Something relevant to exactly what you typed in, nothing more.
Or at least that's the claim.
Thank you NSA and GCHQ (Score:3, Informative)
Closed source? Seems legit.
Re:Proxy ? (Score:3, Informative)
Indeed. And accessing using HTTPS isn't even guaranteeing anything in this browser since the proxy service and the browser is provided by the same party, so they can trivially add their own CA and sign certificates for whatever sites they want.
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Informative)
I see nowhere on their site where the source code is available. That's just a scummy move.
Re:Based on Chromium, not Chrome (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Private Browsing (Score:3, Informative)
I was kinda curious what he meant, myself, so I checked out this old-ish paper.
http://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/pubs/papers/privatebrowsing.pdf [stanford.edu]
I don't know if things have changed much, but their fairly thorough review seems to indicate firefox and chrome are pretty similar.
Looking at their table, one possible area of concern they listed (that Chrome might no longer have a problem with) is zoom level.
That could give information to a site that it is the same person, if they cared, although, that seems to be a pretty minor leak, given all the other information you could be revealing even if you hid your IP (a la panopticlick).
Looks like Chrome retains it from the non-private session, Firefox does not. The download list thing doesn't seem like a big deal. Depends on what you're using it for I guess.
Some leaks they fixed...
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=3493 [google.com]
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=21341 [google.com]
Open issues:
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=867 [google.com]
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=34593 [google.com] (I'm not a fan of this one either, but multiple private windows in Firefox do the same thing)
Back in 2010 Flash added support for private browsing in their plugin (that is, wrt local storage) in Firefox. I have no idea if/when that got added to Chrome.
I saw one complaint that disabled plugins (like Flash) in Chrome were reactivated in Incognito, but I don't know enough about the browser to check that.
Anyway, they seem pretty similar to me.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)