Epic Privacy Browser Review | PCMag

There are plenty of various methods you can make certain protection and privateness in your Internet browser. You can delete your history right after just about every use, for example, or use your browser’s historical past-totally free personal browsing method. You can include a Do Not Keep track of plug-in, or hide your IP handle by going via a proxy. Or… you can only download the cost-free Epic Privacy Browser and get all the privateness capabilities possible, all of them lively by default.

Crafted on the Chromium platform, Epic Privacy Browser won’t enable plug-ins, retains no historical past, and blocks third-bash cookies. With a single click, you can redirect your World wide web browsing by Epic’s individual created-in proxy, thus hiding your IP tackle. Epic constantly broadcasts the business normal “Do Not Monitor” information, but also actively is effective to detect and block advertisement networks, social networks, and World wide web analytics systems that keep track of your surfing action. Throughout the board, it truly is designed for privacy.

Finding Commenced
If you are acquainted with Chrome, you by now know how to use Epic. Download it, set up it, and begin browsing. Its default house webpage, the exact same web site that it shows for a new tab, incorporates 8 panels for your preferred web sites. Two of them are by now populated, 1 with a “how it works” page and one linking to Epic’s private search additional about research later.

Chrome’s new tab webpage automatically populates its panels with your most-used web sites. Epic would not keep any record, so it are unable to know which websites you use most. You can have to have to simply click each individual panel and manually enter what ever URL you wish.

The dwelling page also displays the range of 3rd-get together cookies blocked, as effectively as the variety of trackers blocked. Of class, these studies include the recent session only, due to the fact (I am going to say it once again) Epic would not maintain any heritage.

Immediate Proxy
Just about every Internet webpage request sends your IP deal with to a server without the IP handle the server wouldn’t know the place to send its reply. Based on your IP deal with, a web site can roughly identify your physical site. For example, Google employs this ability to serve up localized benefits, and to exhibit applying the language suitable to your place.

If you’d somewhat not give away your place, Epic features a developed-in proxy. Just simply click the icon at the stop of the Deal with Bar to router your traffic by means of Epic’s safe proxy. Any web-site that attempts to track down you centered on your IP deal with will think you happen to be in New Jersey, where by the proxy server resides

Protected Research
Epic’s very own look for page suggests it is really “driven by the world’s leading look for engines,” but it won’t give away information to individuals engines. It isn’t going to check out to guess what you are typing, and it would not send out referrer info to web-sites that you hyperlink to from its research effects. Your queries get routed by Epic’s proxy server automatically.

Epic also quickly routes queries to key lookup engines as a result of the proxy. This helps prevent the lookup provider from linking your lookup phrases to your IP handle.

Do Not Keep track of

Do Not Observe
Internet sites observe your surfing behaviors for a amount of various reasons. Products and services that obtain advertising and marketing room on many internet sites observe which advertisements you have seen. Analytics companies enable web sites measure matters like the variety of exclusive website people and the variety of sights each and every website page will get. Social media buttons allow you simply share a site, but also keep track of your page visits.

Mozilla launched the Do Not Observe header for Firefox in 2011 Internet Explorer, Opera, and many others before long followed fit. The dilemma is that compliance is strictly voluntary advert services are free to ignore the header. That’s why Epic actively blocks a wide selection of tracking strategies. When you take a look at a website page that includes one or more trackers, it pops up a smaller, transient window in the browser reporting how many it blocked.

The Do Not Track functionality equipped with AVG AntiVirus Cost-free 2014 and Avira No cost AntiVirus (2014) is much more versatile than Epic’s. With AVG and Avira, you can pick regardless of whether or not to block unique trackers, for instance leaving social media and analytics unblocked while blocking advertisement trackers. Epic’s Do Not Observe is an all-or-practically nothing proposition.

On the other hand, Epic totally blocks advertisements, which implies some internet pages will load more rapidly. Of program, if anyone blocked ads then some websites would fold for lack of advert revenues.

Glitches and Restrictions
The reality that Epic would not permit include-ons signifies that most password manager utilities will not perform. Some password supervisors, like RoboForm Just about everywhere 7($16.68 at RoboForm) and Editors’ Decision LastPass 3., guidance bookmarklets for predicaments when you are not able to set up a plug-in. A bookmarklet is a tiny Javascript software which is solely contained in a browser bookmark.

Unfortunately, these bookmarklets count on cookies and on accessibility to the referrer subject, the two of which are blocked by Epic. Alok Bhardwaj, the company’s CEO and founder, informed me that Epic will shortly help a tiny set of plug-ins which include well known password managers, and that the designers are operating on a remedy for the bookmarklet dilemma.

In screening, I uncovered that some websites simply just didn’t operate with Epic, or worked unusually. For instance, when I tried out to take a look at my preferred crossword-puzzle web page through Epic’s proxy, it quickly demanded a username and password. A toolbar button opens a menu that lets you disable certain privateness characteristics, but the only way I could regain accessibility to the crossword site was to cease using the proxy.

The research webpage does draw on key engines, but will not assistance some regular lookup modifiers. For illustration, when I included “intitle:critique” to a research, it asked if I perhaps intended “entitled:evaluation.” Stranger nonetheless, when I entered new search terms soon after certain searches, it did nothing at all. I had to go again to the most important look for site to start a new research.

Worth a Test
If you routinely use InPrivate searching in Net Explorer, Incognito in Chrome, or Private searching in Firefox, take into consideration providing Epic Privacy Browser a try. With Epic, privateness is not an possibility it is the default. Certainly, there are a handful of glitches this is surely a function in progress. But Epic Privacy Browser will absolutely safeguard your on the net privacy.