A new study by the Dublin, Ireland based Trinity College has found that, out of 6 of the most popular web browsers, Brave is the one that most respects its users' privacy.

The study, titled "Web Browser Privacy: What Do Browsers Say When They Phone Home?" compares the following 6 web browsers:

Brave

Google Chrome

Microsoft Edge (The new Chromium version)

Mozilla Firefox

Safari

Yandex.Browser

The test used for the browsers logged all network traffic on each device that they ran on. Additionally, special care was provided in order to ensure that the systems were running completely fresh operating system and web browser installs.

Out of all 6 browsers, Brave is the only one that didn't utilize identifies that could track IP addresses over time or share what webpages have been visited on the browser to backend servers. Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all did so using their built-in search autocomplete functionality and session-persisting browser background processes.

The study found that Brave didn't need to be configured for its privacy friendly nature either. Its out of the box default settings respect the privacy of its users. On the other hand, Microsoft Edge and Yandex both have persistent IP monitoring and uses a hashed hardware identifier in order to relay information to backend servers. This behavior isn't possible to disable, either.

All 6 of these web browsers are available to download for free, though the information this study provides may shift your preference towards a particular few.

Further coverage:

Trinity College

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