Epic Privacy Browser Review | PCMag

There are a great deal of various approaches you can ensure stability and privateness in your Net browser. You can delete your heritage after each and every use, for illustration, or use your browser’s historical past-absolutely free private browsing mode. You can insert a Do Not Monitor plug-in, or disguise your IP address by likely by way of a proxy. Or… you can merely download the absolutely free Epic Privateness Browser and get all the privacy features conceivable, all of them active by default.

Built on the Chromium platform, Epic Privateness Browser doesn’t let plug-ins, retains no historical past, and blocks 3rd-occasion cookies. With a solitary click on, you can redirect your World wide web surfing by way of Epic’s have constructed-in proxy, therefore hiding your IP handle. Epic always broadcasts the industry typical “Do Not Monitor” information, but also actively is effective to detect and block ad networks, social networks, and Internet analytics programs that keep track of your browsing activity. Across the board, it can be made for privacy.

Obtaining Commenced
If you’re acquainted with Chrome, you now know how to use Epic. Down load it, install it, and begin surfing. Its default household site, the same website page that it shows for a new tab, has 8 panels for your beloved websites. Two of them are already populated, a single with a “how it performs” web page and a person linking to Epic’s private look for a lot more about research later.

Chrome’s new tab webpage quickly populates its panels with your most-utilized internet sites. Epic would not maintain any history, so it can’t know which web sites you use most. You can need to click every panel and manually enter whatever URL you want.

The home web page also shows the amount of third-celebration cookies blocked, as well as the number of trackers blocked. Of study course, these figures include the present-day session only, due to the fact (I will say it yet again) Epic doesn’t maintain any history.

Quick Proxy
Each Website webpage request sends your IP tackle to a server without having the IP deal with the server wouldn’t know in which to mail its reply. Based on your IP handle, a web site can roughly establish your physical place. For illustration, Google employs this capability to provide up localized benefits, and to screen working with the language suitable to your spot.

If you would instead not give away your place, Epic gives a designed-in proxy. Just simply click the icon at the end of the Handle Bar to router your site visitors by way of Epic’s protected proxy. Any internet site that attempts to locate you based on your IP tackle will assume you are in New Jersey, where by the proxy server resides

Protected Lookup
Epic’s possess search webpage says it is “powered by the world’s foremost lookup engines,” but it isn’t going to give absent facts to those people engines. It will not attempt to guess what you are typing, and it will not deliver referrer knowledge to web-sites that you website link to from its research results. Your queries get routed as a result of Epic’s proxy server mechanically.

Epic also instantly routes queries to key search engines as a result of the proxy. This helps prevent the look for support from linking your search terms to your IP tackle.

Do Not Keep track of

Do Not Monitor
Web sites observe your browsing patterns for a variety of various motives. Expert services that invest in promotion place on various sites keep track of which ads you’ve got noticed. Analytics companies enable internet websites measure items like the number of one of a kind web site readers and the number of views each and every website page will get. Social media buttons let you quickly share a website page, but also observe your web site visits.

Mozilla released the Do Not Observe header for Firefox in 2011 Net Explorer, Opera, and other people quickly followed suit. The challenge is that compliance is strictly voluntary ad companies are no cost to overlook the header. Which is why Epic actively blocks a extensive variety of tracking procedures. When you pay a visit to a webpage that consists of one particular or a lot more trackers, it pops up a modest, transient window in just the browser reporting how many it blocked.

The Do Not Monitor functionality equipped with AVG AntiVirus Free 2014 and Avira Totally free AntiVirus (2014) is far more adaptable than Epic’s. With AVG and Avira, you can choose whether or not to block precise trackers, for example leaving social media and analytics unblocked though blocking advertisement trackers. Epic’s Do Not Keep track of is an all-or-absolutely nothing proposition.

On the other hand, Epic absolutely blocks adverts, which usually means some web pages will load more rapidly. Of system, if everybody blocked advertisements then some sites would fold for absence of advert revenues.

Glitches and Constraints
The fact that Epic will not make it possible for add-ons implies that most password manager utilities will never do the job. Some password managers, together with RoboForm Everywhere 7($16.68 at RoboForm)(Opens in a new window) and Editors’ Option LastPass 3., help bookmarklets for cases when you can not put in a plug-in. A bookmarklet is a little Javascript plan that’s solely contained in a browser bookmark.

Sad to say, these bookmarklets count on cookies and on accessibility to the referrer area, the two of which are blocked by Epic. Alok Bhardwaj, the company’s CEO and founder, informed me that Epic will before long guidance a small established of plug-ins together with common password managers, and that the designers are performing on a option for the bookmarklet challenge.

In testing, I discovered that some web sites simply did not do the job with Epic, or worked unusually. For case in point, when I tried using to pay a visit to my favored crossword-puzzle internet site by using Epic’s proxy, it all of a sudden demanded a username and password. A toolbar button opens a menu that allows you disable distinct privateness features, but the only way I could regain entry to the crossword web-site was to prevent working with the proxy.

The research site does attract on main engines, but does not guidance some standard research modifiers. For example, when I included “intitle:evaluate” to a search, it questioned if I most likely meant “entitled:critique.” Stranger continue to, when I entered new search conditions right after specific lookups, it did very little. I experienced to go again to the most important lookup site to start off a new search.

Value a Check out
If you routinely use InPrivate searching in World wide web Explorer, Incognito in Chrome, or Non-public searching in Firefox, take into account giving Epic Privateness Browser a consider. With Epic, privacy isn’t an possibility it can be the default. Yes, there are a handful of glitches this is definitely a get the job done in development. But Epic Privateness Browser will absolutely guard your online privateness.