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

Site specific Flash blocking

[n-baxley]

I can block images from a certian server, but not flash ads^H^H^H elements from sepecific servers.

Cookies

[storem]

I'm quite proud that I switched from IE on Win & Mac to Mozilla on Win, Max & Linux. It's privacy management concerning cookies is far better than the impossible hassle you come against with IE.

However it would be nice to have logging of which cookies are actually used during a browsing session so you can keep track of who's tracking you. Maybe this is possible and/or exists in other browsers?

Mozilla (almost) rules

[nrosier]

I use Mozilla on all platforms I'm running but combine it with bannerfilter on squid. Mozilla doesn't support regexps yet for picture-blocking but is host-based until they fix bug 78104. Disk cache is switched on though as I'm the only user on my system so I don't see this as a possible security problem.
Cookies are selectively permitted and pop-ups are blocked.
Security is imho the biggest reason to use Mozilla in stead of IE.

Re:Mozilla (almost) rules

[KnightStalker]

One way to block images and Flash by substring (not regex) is to use CSS3 selectors in your userContent.css file. For example:

embed[src=*"doubleclick.net"] { display: none!important; }
img[src=*"ads.slashdot.org"] { display: none!important; }
*[src=*"microsoft.com"] { text-decoration: blink!important; }

You get the idea. The "!important" part means "override the author's style sheets", not "not important" which is what I initially thought it meant. :-)

iCab

[singularity]

iCab, available only for the Mac, is one of the best browsers I have seen as far as privacy goes.

It can filter images based on the server, link, size, or anything else.
It can filter cookies based on the server, duration, or anything else.
it can filter JavaScript (InScript) based on server, action, or anything else.

One of the best features: You can set it to only use "Referer" from within the same domain. So if I link to a Sony.com page from Slashdot, Sony has no idea how I got to the page. But Sony can track how I navigate their site (You can also set iCab to never send referer:)

There are more features than I could ever list here. Suffice to say it is very powerful and very configurable. Anyone using MacOS deserves to look at it.

it is still missing a few things, and it is compliant to a fault at times (with regards to page layout), but I use it for 99.5% of my browsing without and problems.

Re:Treating Flash like images

[leviramsey]

Opera 6.1 (at least for Linux) offers one-button disabling of all plugins on a per-window basis.

Re:Konqueror and cookies

[heikkile]

Blocking regular ads on pages is an interesting feature in Mozilla, which I'm glad doesn't exist in konqueror or most other browsers - I can't see how this could be good for the user in the long run.

Compromise: How about a feature that allows me to specify that from some sites I do not want ads at all, and from other sites I want to download the ad, but not display it. Thus the site gets their advertising money, and I am not bothered. Haven't seen this in any browser yet, though.

Re:A quick work around for this

[beebware]

You may find this list of ad servers more useful than just having a single entry for DoubleClick.