Yep, looks like you are right, google is just so pervasive. I will try epic and brave and see how I get on.

Apart from auto tampering with your browser such as the robots firefox incident or brave deciding to autoblock old versions.

There was a research paper investigating the privacy features of the browser several years ago

They approached it from the perspective of hiding illicit activities from the police, rather than the intended use of stopping evil Google's tracking network from obseriving your every breath.

Their conclusion? It works well enough to hide naughty pictures from the wife, but not technically competent police.

I haven't looked for further studies involving tracking protection, but I would expect them to be rather ephemeral. What worked 6 months ago may do nothing against current tracking practices.

I wasn’t aware of the firefox incident. It does however highlight how little we as users, have control over our own tech.
I have to now, with anything installed, go through endless settings and setup items. For instance, Firefox has everything turned, remove all history/cookies on exit, no extensions, no themes etc. I don’t often use the private window however, not really sure what that adds to the mix. However I still have no faith in that. I suppose there is now a deep inbred distrust of anything going out of the cable from the house, I certainly wouldn’t have these things like Alexa around!

Looks like, from what I have read, Firefox is best for day to day or Brave. With tor browser as most secure and slowest.

Might also invest some time looking into vpn, either the epic browser above, or protonvpn.

Link to a contemporary report

I expect the participation rate in studies cratered after that.

Of course, everyone who went and disabled studies after that incident were forced to turn them back on when an expiring ceritificate disabled every single addon.

A 'study' was the fastest way of shipping a fix, and an ad-filled web was too horrifying a prospect to wait for the proper software update.

Thankfully I don’t use add ons (well, YouTube downloader occasionally, but it gets removed after use), and don’t use extensions/themes. Again serious distrust in any of it. Last fun thing was notifications, didn’t even know what was, but one day they started appearing, without my consent! Took me a while to track that down.
Much like this cookie nonsense. Government tries to stop companies spamming everything with malware, adware and spyware, so said companies just put a screen up which you have to ok all those before using the page, winner!

Was aware about Brave's block, but just caught on the Robot's stunt on FF which I was totally unaware of (now read on that). Which is probably due to the fact I didn't get that nasty since I've put FF under lock and key, as in it doesn't do/install/update anything unless it first gets my manual go ahead, which is most of the time a big no aside for security related stuff .

Well, I will give you a bit of an update on this. I installed Epic Privacy Browser a little while back. First off it has a peculiar install, you will not see it as an installed app, nor does it have a programs folder. It’s located under user, which causes issues if you have multiple user accounts. Opening it, it looks like chrome (well it is after all), and seems to have most options turned off. To run VPN you need to install an extension - it tells you how on first open and is very simple. The vpn is simple to use, a button up to the right sets it on or off, and you can select which country you want. I have fiddled with it and it seems to work pretty well.

I will continue trying it for a bit and give an update later on. Will also get round to trying brave, and tor amongst others at some point.

https://www.palemoon.org/

https://addons.palemoon.org/extensions/privacy-and-security/

Is that supported by Tencent?

Sorry, what is it your trying to say? Pale moon isn’t on my radar to have a look at, only a couple of specific ones (well started out as epic privacy only), and that specifically for inbuilt vpn.
I can’t look at all of them as there are hundreds of forks of chrome or Firefox.
Who, or what is?

What is this topic about? You get your answer.
Oh so this is not from epic games :P
why chose this name then...

btw use vivaldi or opera these are the best

This blog by NordVPN may be of interest : https://nordvpn.com/blog/best-privacy-browser/

They rate Firefox as the best for privacy with Epic coming second, although they both get a privacy rating of 5 out of 5. I'd be interested in what others think.

I'm currently using Epic as a secondary browser.

NordVPN also have a lightweight article about private search engines : https://nordvpn.com/blog/private-search-engines/

Thanks. I think that might be one article I did look at. I use Firefox as main browser, reasonably happy with it. Epic seems pretty easy with the vpn. Suprised edge is on the list, can’t imagine anyone recommending M$ browsers for anything, chrome at least works even if it leaks all your data everywhere.

In terms of search engines, I have used start page on my main machine for years, great search. Have just switched all devices over to DuckDuckGo to avoid using google. Only really use maps and YouTube (occasionally) now, so slowly making the break. The others on there I didn’t know.