Epic Privacy Browser Review | PCMag

There are a good deal of unique techniques you can make sure protection and privacy in your World-wide-web browser. You can delete your historical past following each use, for instance, or use your browser’s history-cost-free private browsing manner. You can add a Do Not Track plug-in, or hide your IP tackle by going through a proxy. Or… you can only download the free Epic Privateness Browser and get all the privateness options conceivable, all of them lively by default.

Created on the Chromium system, Epic Privateness Browser will not allow plug-ins, retains no history, and blocks 3rd-social gathering cookies. With a one simply click, you can redirect your Web browsing by Epic’s have created-in proxy, thereby hiding your IP deal with. Epic usually broadcasts the market regular “Do Not Track” information, but also actively is effective to detect and block ad networks, social networks, and World-wide-web analytics units that observe your surfing activity. Across the board, it can be developed for privateness.

Having Started off
If you are familiar with Chrome, you previously know how to use Epic. Down load it, set up it, and start surfing. Its default dwelling page, the same webpage that it shows for a new tab, contains 8 panels for your favorite sites. Two of them are presently populated, a single with a “how it performs” site and 1 linking to Epic’s personal lookup much more about research afterwards.

Chrome’s new tab webpage immediately populates its panels with your most-employed web sites. Epic does not maintain any record, so it can not know which sites you use most. You will will need to click each panel and manually enter what ever URL you wish.

The residence website page also displays the selection of third-bash cookies blocked, as nicely as the number of trackers blocked. Of training course, these statistics cover the recent session only, because (I’ll say it once more) Epic doesn’t preserve any record.

Instantaneous Proxy
Just about every World-wide-web page ask for sends your IP tackle to a server devoid of the IP address the server would not know exactly where to send its reply. Dependent on your IP address, a internet site can roughly establish your bodily place. For example, Google utilizes this capacity to serve up localized success, and to show making use of the language appropriate to your location.

If you’d instead not give absent your site, Epic presents a built-in proxy. Just click the icon at the end of the Deal with Bar to router your targeted traffic as a result of Epic’s safe proxy. Any internet site that attempts to find you dependent on your IP deal with will consider you’re in New Jersey, where by the proxy server resides

Secure Search
Epic’s have lookup web page states it truly is “driven by the world’s foremost look for engines,” but it will not give absent data to individuals engines. It doesn’t attempt to guess what you are typing, and it will not send out referrer info to web sites that you url to from its search results. Your queries get routed by way of Epic’s proxy server quickly.

Epic also quickly routes queries to important research engines through the proxy. This stops the research assistance from linking your search conditions to your IP tackle.

Do Not Monitor

Do Not Keep track of
Web-sites track your surfing behaviors for a range of various explanations. Expert services that buy promotion house on several web sites track which adverts you have seen. Analytics products and services aid web sites measure matters like the selection of exceptional web page website visitors and the selection of views just about every webpage will get. Social media buttons enable you simply share a website page, but also observe your page visits.

Mozilla introduced the Do Not Track header for Firefox in 2011 Internet Explorer, Opera, and many others quickly followed suit. The problem is that compliance is strictly voluntary advertisement solutions are absolutely free to ignore the header. That is why Epic actively blocks a large variety of monitoring techniques. When you go to a website page that features 1 or additional trackers, it pops up a smaller, transient window in the browser reporting how several it blocked.

The Do Not Track operation supplied with AVG AntiVirus No cost 2014 and Avira Free of charge AntiVirus (2014) is far more flexible than Epic’s. With AVG and Avira, you can choose regardless of whether or not to block certain trackers, for illustration leaving social media and analytics unblocked when blocking advertisement trackers. Epic’s Do Not Keep track of is an all-or-absolutely nothing proposition.

On the other hand, Epic totally blocks adverts, which suggests some pages will load more rapidly. Of course, if everybody blocked adverts then some sites would fold for lack of advertisement revenues.

Glitches and Restrictions
The simple fact that Epic would not make it possible for include-ons indicates that most password supervisor utilities won’t get the job done. Some password managers, together with RoboForm Everywhere 7($16.68 at RoboForm) and Editors’ Alternative LastPass 3., aid bookmarklets for circumstances when you cannot put in a plug-in. A bookmarklet is a very small Javascript plan that is entirely contained in a browser bookmark.

Sad to say, these bookmarklets count on cookies and on accessibility to the referrer field, both equally of which are blocked by Epic. Alok Bhardwaj, the firm’s CEO and founder, explained to me that Epic will soon help a modest set of plug-ins which includes well known password administrators, and that the designers are operating on a solution for the bookmarklet challenge.

In tests, I uncovered that some internet websites just didn’t function with Epic, or labored strangely. For instance, when I experimented with to check out my favorite crossword-puzzle web-site by way of Epic’s proxy, it abruptly demanded a username and password. A toolbar button opens a menu that lets you disable unique privateness capabilities, but the only way I could regain access to the crossword web page was to quit utilizing the proxy.

The search web site does attract on big engines, but won’t help some standard search modifiers. For illustration, when I included “intitle:critique” to a lookup, it requested if I possibly meant “entitled:overview.” Stranger nevertheless, when I entered new research terms after specified searches, it did practically nothing. I had to go back to the primary look for site to commence a new research.

Worth a Attempt
If you routinely use InPrivate browsing in Internet Explorer, Incognito in Chrome, or Private browsing in Firefox, take into account giving Epic Privacy Browser a consider. With Epic, privacy is not an option it is the default. Of course, there are a number of glitches this is certainly a perform in progress. But Epic Privacy Browser will absolutely guard your online privacy.