Epic Privacy Browser Review | PCMag

There are loads of distinctive ways you can make sure safety and privateness in your Web browser. You can delete your heritage right after each use, for instance, or use your browser’s background-free of charge personal searching method. You can increase a Do Not Observe plug-in, or hide your IP deal with by likely via a proxy. Or… you can only obtain the free of charge Epic Privacy Browser and get all the privateness attributes conceivable, all of them active by default.

Designed on the Chromium system, Epic Privateness Browser doesn’t permit plug-ins, retains no history, and blocks 3rd-occasion cookies. With a single simply click, you can redirect your World wide web surfing as a result of Epic’s have created-in proxy, therefore hiding your IP tackle. Epic often broadcasts the industry common “Do Not Keep track of” information, but also actively will work to detect and block advert networks, social networks, and Website analytics devices that track your surfing activity. Throughout the board, it truly is developed for privateness.

Receiving Commenced
If you’re common with Chrome, you by now know how to use Epic. Obtain it, set up it, and get started browsing. Its default home web page, the similar webpage that it shows for a new tab, is made up of eight panels for your favorite websites. Two of them are already populated, just one with a “how it will work” web page and one linking to Epic’s non-public research additional about look for later.

Chrome’s new tab web page immediately populates its panels with your most-applied web-sites. Epic won’t keep any background, so it won’t be able to know which web sites you use most. You can need to simply click every panel and manually enter whatever URL you desire.

The house webpage also displays the selection of third-party cookies blocked, as effectively as the quantity of trackers blocked. Of study course, these stats go over the present-day session only, considering the fact that (I will say it yet again) Epic won’t retain any heritage.

Instant Proxy
Just about every Net website page request sends your IP address to a server with no the IP address the server wouldn’t know the place to mail its reply. Centered on your IP address, a internet site can around identify your physical area. For example, Google employs this skill to provide up localized outcomes, and to display utilizing the language appropriate to your place.

If you’d relatively not give away your area, Epic delivers a designed-in proxy. Just simply click the icon at the finish of the Address Bar to router your targeted visitors by way of Epic’s protected proxy. Any web site that tries to find you centered on your IP deal with will feel you happen to be in New Jersey, exactly where the proxy server resides

Secure Search
Epic’s have look for web site states it is “run by the world’s leading look for engines,” but it will not give absent facts to these engines. It won’t try to guess what you happen to be typing, and it will not mail referrer facts to web-sites that you website link to from its search results. Your queries get routed via Epic’s proxy server quickly.

Epic also immediately routes queries to important look for engines by way of the proxy. This prevents the research company from linking your research conditions to your IP deal with.

Do Not Keep track of

Do Not Monitor
Internet websites keep track of your surfing routines for a quantity of diverse motives. Products and services that purchase promotion house on various internet websites observe which adverts you have witnessed. Analytics products and services aid sites measure issues like the quantity of one of a kind website site visitors and the variety of sights each site will get. Social media buttons enable you conveniently share a web site, but also monitor your page visits.

Mozilla launched the Do Not Keep track of header for Firefox in 2011 Online Explorer, Opera, and other individuals shortly followed fit. The trouble is that compliance is strictly voluntary advertisement providers are no cost to disregard the header. Which is why Epic actively blocks a broad selection of monitoring approaches. When you check out a webpage that features one particular or more trackers, it pops up a little, transient window within just the browser reporting how quite a few it blocked.

The Do Not Keep track of functionality equipped with AVG AntiVirus Free 2014 and Avira No cost AntiVirus (2014) is additional adaptable than Epic’s. With AVG and Avira, you can pick out no matter if or not to block certain trackers, for case in point leaving social media and analytics unblocked although blocking advertisement trackers. Epic’s Do Not Track is an all-or-nothing at all proposition.

On the other hand, Epic fully blocks ads, which means some webpages will load quicker. Of program, if anyone blocked adverts then some internet sites would fold for lack of advertisement revenues.

Glitches and Limitations
The truth that Epic isn’t going to allow for insert-ons implies that most password manager utilities won’t get the job done. Some password professionals, which include RoboForm All over the place 7($16.68 at RoboForm) and Editors’ Choice LastPass 3., aid bookmarklets for predicaments when you can’t install a plug-in. A bookmarklet is a little Javascript software that’s entirely contained in a browser bookmark.

Sadly, these bookmarklets depend on cookies and on entry to the referrer industry, both equally of which are blocked by Epic. Alok Bhardwaj, the firm’s CEO and founder, instructed me that Epic will soon guidance a modest set of plug-ins such as well known password professionals, and that the designers are doing the job on a option for the bookmarklet dilemma.

In screening, I located that some internet websites simply just did not get the job done with Epic, or worked surprisingly. For illustration, when I attempted to pay a visit to my favored crossword-puzzle web-site via Epic’s proxy, it suddenly demanded a username and password. A toolbar button opens a menu that allows you disable precise privacy attributes, but the only way I could get back accessibility to the crossword internet site was to halt employing the proxy.

The search page does attract on main engines, but will not support some standard research modifiers. For instance, when I included “intitle:critique” to a lookup, it asked if I maybe supposed “entitled:critique.” Stranger even now, when I entered new lookup conditions after particular lookups, it did absolutely nothing. I had to go back to the primary search website page to begin a new lookup.

Truly worth a Consider
If you routinely use InPrivate browsing in Web Explorer, Incognito in Chrome, or Non-public browsing in Firefox, take into consideration offering Epic Privacy Browser a check out. With Epic, privateness is not an alternative it is really the default. Of course, there are a couple glitches this is surely a operate in progress. But Epic Privacy Browser will certainly guard your on the web privateness.