PrivacyTests.org - Web Browser privacy test results chart

[ssfc72]

https://privacytests.org/

Tom M. sent me an email about this website, that does a very extensive automated test of numerous web browsers and shows the results in one chart.  Excellent resource.

Librewolf browser looked like it had very good privacy results, so I installed it on my Mint notebook computer.  It seems to be very quick to render web pages and it plays the video streaming articles on the BBC.com website, just fine.  So Librewolf may stay on my computer. :-)

[Jason]

I wanted to see just how well Brave stacked up against Librewolf. So I decided to count the number of test failures with each browser.

It turns out that Brave failed a surprising 20 tests which I found startling. However, I still thought that Librewolf would end up on top. So I was even more surprised to find that LibreWolf's failed 30! Still far ahead of the other browsers as you can see especially the more popular ones like Chrome and Firefox.

I counted failures on other browsers that are available for Linux. However, I will note that for the Desktop browsers it doesn't note whether the ones tested are Windows, Linux or MacOS (is that what's it called now, Fox?). All the browsers listed have both Windows and Linux versions. I don't know if they're all supported on Linux.

Also, some browsers were missing a feature that allowed the test. If a browser doesn't have a feature, how can we compare it to a browser that failed but does? But I just counted fails regardless. Here are the failures by browser:

Code Select Expand

Brave          20
Chrome         84
Edge           84
Firefox        74
Librewolf      30
Opera          83
Safari         69
Tor            55
Ungoogled      77
Vivaldi        84

As you can see, Brave is light years ahead of most browsers with Librewolf being not far behind. I find it interesting that Brave actually is better at privacy when Librewolf includes an adblocker extension. That means Brave must be better with blocking tracking or ads than using the uBlock extension.

The next one up is Tor but it's way back. I would have thought it'd come out on top since its whole point of existence is to anonymize the user. However, it's important to note that while Tor might allow for some things, like tracking, cookies and other information saved from websites is dropped as soon as you leave the browser. Not sure how much that would affect its score.

Not surprised that Chrome is the worst but surprised that Edge and Opera were almost as bad. And I thought Firefox would have done better. I can see why LibreWolf branched off from it now.

[Jason]

I forgot to add that I'm not sure why Ungoogled and Librewolf are even on the lists. I've never heard of either until now. There are many other browsers that are as well or better known but aren't included. For example, Chromium.

[Jason]

I forgot to add before that I have no idea really which leakage "features" are worse than others so that still makes it hard to compare browsers. So I just took the simplest approach.