Browsers Which Protect Your Privacy?

valkraider asks: "Browsers are getting better at protecting user's privacy. Mozilla has pretty good cookie preferences. Many browsers like OmniWeb for Mac OS X will block images from sites based on wildcard expressions (like *ad*). Most browsers have settings to delete cookies and cache and such at the end of each session. Even IE for windows (not Mac) will allow you to 'import' a privacy file and control many things pretty tightly. Currently on PCs I use Mozilla with no disk cache, no persistent cookies, no third party images,and many blocked image sites. I can do almost the same with Chimera on Mac OS X. What are people's favorite browsers for protecting your privacy?" Which browsers provide the best balance between functionality and privacy? What privacy features would you like to see, that are missing from those currently available?"

Comments

I use...

[doofsmack]

Opera and proxomitron. It allows me to filter out flash like everyone's complaining about, and you can set rules for just about everything sent and recieved. Very nice.

Got to say it...

[MattCohn.com]

Opera! It's got a wide array of privacy features. You can not only turn off cookies, images, GIF animation, and all that, but you can do it on the fly by pressing the F12 key. Also, you can choose not to send reffer information along to the site, if you don't want them to know where you came from. One more thing, you can choose to identify as Opera, MSIE, and from 3 different versions of Mozilla. And that's just in the 6.x version, the 7 beta is now availible for download from opera.com!

Dynamic filtering

[crow]

It turns out that you can filter out anything you want, much like using a Junkbuster proxy, only without using a proxy. Most modern browsers have a feature called "Automatic Proxy Configuration." What this is is a user-provided JavaScript function that parses each URL before it is fetched to determine what proxy to use. You can then use a default of going direct to the real server, but use an alternate proxy for anything that looks like an ad or other unwanted content.

I use this with both IE and Mozilla. I have Mozilla ask before accepting cookies, so I've added a bunch of usage tracking sites to my proxy script.

You can find a sample of how to do this at a friend's site: no-ads

A filtering proxy ususally beats inbuilt features

[SteWhite]

I use Privoxy (get if from SourceForge).

It's a filtering HTTP proxy, incredibly configurable, and of course browser and platform independant. The "out of the box" config also does a really good job (IMHO) of filtering without being too intrusive.

Features include:

Filtering images, flash and java applets

Cookie management including transforming permanent cookies to session based cookies.

Pop-up window killing

Filtering of any URL pattern with regular expressions

.... plus much more. Really, to much to list. Try it.

privoxy

[petard]

I find that privoxy works better for me than the mechanisms built in to any browser. It's based on the old junkbusters codebase with many more features. It's available for both windows and very nearly any form of UNIX (or UNIX-like) OS you might reasonably use to browse the net. (Of course, I have it set to allow ads for slashdot :-)) In combination with phoenix's popup blocking (which takes care of SSL sites such as hushmail that privoxy can't) I find that it gives me near-perfect control over my browsing experience.

That said, if I really suspect that a particular site may be malicious, as opposed to simply obnoxious, I look it over in lynx first.

Re:Cookies

[valkraider]

You can save this as an XML file, and then import it into IE6's privacy settings.

<MSIEPrivacy>
<MSIEPrivacySetting s formatVersion="6">
<p3pCookiePolicy zone="internet">
<firstParty noPolicyDefault="forceSession" noRuleDefault="forceSession" alwaysAllowSession="no">
</firstParty>
<thirdPar ty noPolicyDefault="reject" noRuleDefault="reject" alwaysAllowSession="no">
</thirdParty>
</p3pCook iePolicy>
<flushCookies/>
</MSIEPrivacySettings>
</MSIEPrivacy>

*NOTE* The submit process is adding some spaces..
Line 2: remove space in MSIEPrivacySettings
Line 6: remove space in thirdParty
Line 8: remove space in p3pCookiePolicy

These custom settings force ALL cookies to session lifetime, and does not allow 3rd party cookies. It will flush all your existing cookies when you import it. (you can remove the flush cookies element to not flush them on import).