There are already a number of products, both browsers and search engines, that focus specifically on privacy and anonymity – for example Brave and DuckDuckGo. Now another candidate has announced his arrival, according to the site, among others Cnet.
VPN provider Mullvad VPN and the Tor Project have teamed up to create a brand new browser – its name is molvad browser.
market vacuum
Thus, the new browser is a fresh addition to the existing product flora for privacy-conscious users. The idea behind Mullvad Browser is that it should combine the best of the Tor network and VPN technology, but without actually using the Tor network.
We want to free the Internet from mass surveillance, and a VPN alone is not enough to achieve privacy. In our view, there was a gap in the market for those who wanted to run a privacy-oriented browser that was as good as the Tor Project, but with a VPN instead of the Tor network, the press release said.
new browser, which can be downloaded for free from this page, It was developed by Tor engineers and aims to reduce tracking and various types of digital identification of the user – “fingerprints”, as they are called in the original language.
Mullvad Browser promises to do this in several different ways. Among other things, the browser uses what the developers call “unified” settings, which allow the user to be “hidden” in the crowd by all users with the same settings.
It is indeed possible to change the settings, but the browser recommends users to refrain from doing so.
Special mode as standard and “cookie boxes”
In addition, it was confirmed that only a few fonts were available in the browser, which limited the collection of this type of data. Otherwise, the browser blocked many APIs used for user profiling.
The developers also point out that a somewhat “subtle” method of obtaining data is to scale the user’s browser window. Mullvad Browser has a function to prevent this by adding a field around the browser window, which helps hide the real size.
The private mode of the browser is activated by default, which means that no cookies are stored between browsing sessions. In addition, the browser also uses an FPI (First Party Isolation) solution.
This means that third-party cookies are isolated into separate “cookie jars” on each visited domain, so that the trackers used by advertisers cannot be linked together to build a user profile. This feature is already in Tor Browser.
Mullvad Browser has also removed all telemetry data, that is, pure technical data used, among other things, to improve performance. This data is not necessarily user-friendly for tracking individuals, but the developers still chose to remove this feature to reduce data collection.
More information on how Mullvad Browser works can be found at this since.
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