Epic Privacy Browser Review | PCMag

There are plenty of distinctive means you can be certain protection and privacy in your Web browser. You can delete your heritage following each use, for instance, or use your browser’s history-cost-free personal searching method. You can add a Do Not Track plug-in, or cover your IP address by likely by means of a proxy. Or… you can simply obtain the free of charge Epic Privacy Browser and get all the privateness attributes imaginable, all of them active by default.

Built on the Chromium platform, Epic Privateness Browser would not let plug-ins, retains no heritage, and blocks third-occasion cookies. With a solitary click on, you can redirect your Web surfing by way of Epic’s personal created-in proxy, thus hiding your IP tackle. Epic generally broadcasts the industry typical “Do Not Track” message, but also actively performs to detect and block advertisement networks, social networks, and World-wide-web analytics devices that observe your browsing action. Across the board, it can be developed for privateness.

Finding Commenced
If you happen to be acquainted with Chrome, you currently know how to use Epic. Obtain it, install it, and start off surfing. Its default home web site, the identical webpage that it shows for a new tab, includes eight panels for your favorite web sites. Two of them are already populated, a single with a “how it operates” webpage and a single linking to Epic’s private research far more about look for later.

Chrome’s new tab website page mechanically populates its panels with your most-employed web-sites. Epic doesn’t keep any heritage, so it can not know which internet sites you use most. You can expect to need to have to click on each and every panel and manually enter whichever URL you desire.

The property web page also displays the selection of 3rd-social gathering cookies blocked, as perfectly as the selection of trackers blocked. Of program, these figures include the current session only, considering that (I am going to say it once more) Epic doesn’t retain any background.

Quick Proxy
Every World-wide-web web page request sends your IP handle to a server without the IP address the server would not know in which to deliver its reply. Primarily based on your IP deal with, a website can about identify your bodily location. For example, Google uses this capability to provide up localized results, and to display screen employing the language appropriate to your location.

If you would alternatively not give absent your spot, Epic provides a developed-in proxy. Just simply click the icon at the end of the Address Bar to router your website traffic through Epic’s secure proxy. Any web site that attempts to locate you centered on your IP tackle will think you’re in New Jersey, in which the proxy server resides

Protected Search
Epic’s very own look for page says it can be “powered by the world’s major research engines,” but it does not give away data to those people engines. It will not attempt to guess what you are typing, and it does not deliver referrer knowledge to internet sites that you connection to from its research benefits. Your queries get routed by way of Epic’s proxy server instantly.

Epic also quickly routes queries to significant lookup engines as a result of the proxy. This prevents the search service from linking your research conditions to your IP handle.

Do Not Keep track of

Do Not Track
Web sites observe your surfing patterns for a variety of different explanations. Services that get promotion house on several web-sites observe which adverts you’ve got viewed. Analytics products and services support web-sites evaluate points like the amount of exclusive web site readers and the range of sights each and every webpage receives. Social media buttons allow you simply share a web page, but also track your webpage visits.

Mozilla released the Do Not Keep track of header for Firefox in 2011 Internet Explorer, Opera, and other folks soon adopted go well with. The problem is that compliance is strictly voluntary ad products and services are no cost to ignore the header. Which is why Epic actively blocks a large range of monitoring procedures. When you stop by a web site that incorporates just one or a lot more trackers, it pops up a small, transient window within the browser reporting how lots of it blocked.

The Do Not Observe operation equipped with AVG AntiVirus Absolutely free 2014 and Avira Cost-free AntiVirus (2014) is much more flexible than Epic’s. With AVG and Avira, you can select regardless of whether or not to block certain trackers, for illustration leaving social media and analytics unblocked even though blocking advert trackers. Epic’s Do Not Keep track of is an all-or-practically nothing proposition.

On the other hand, Epic fully blocks adverts, which usually means some pages will load quicker. Of training course, if absolutely everyone blocked ads then some websites would fold for deficiency of advert revenues.

Glitches and Limits
The reality that Epic would not allow add-ons signifies that most password supervisor utilities is not going to perform. Some password managers, including RoboForm Almost everywhere 7($16.68 at RoboForm) and Editors’ Decision LastPass 3., assistance bookmarklets for situations when you are not able to set up a plug-in. A bookmarklet is a little Javascript system which is entirely contained in a browser bookmark.

Regretably, these bookmarklets count on cookies and on access to the referrer industry, the two of which are blocked by Epic. Alok Bhardwaj, the firm’s CEO and founder, told me that Epic will before long assist a tiny set of plug-ins which include preferred password supervisors, and that the designers are performing on a option for the bookmarklet dilemma.

In testing, I discovered that some web sites basically didn’t work with Epic, or worked surprisingly. For illustration, when I tried to take a look at my favourite crossword-puzzle internet site by way of Epic’s proxy, it suddenly demanded a username and password. A toolbar button opens a menu that allows you disable distinct privateness options, but the only way I could get back access to the crossword web-site was to halt using the proxy.

The research webpage does attract on big engines, but won’t assistance some typical lookup modifiers. For instance, when I included “intitle:overview” to a look for, it requested if I maybe intended “entitled:critique.” Stranger still, when I entered new research terms immediately after specified lookups, it did very little. I had to go again to the major research page to begin a new research.

Worth a Try out
If you routinely use InPrivate browsing in Net Explorer, Incognito in Chrome, or Private browsing in Firefox, take into consideration supplying Epic Privacy Browser a try out. With Epic, privacy is not an alternative it’s the default. Indeed, there are a several glitches this is unquestionably a perform in development. But Epic Privacy Browser will absolutely guard your online privacy.