Installing a new browser does not end with launching it. At the first start, browsers go through a tune-up phase - they download something, configure it and, of course, report it. If you look at the corresponding network requests, you can learn a lot about the browser - in particular, what information about the user and the device it will share with an unidentified group of people.
In this article, we evaluated the behavior of five browsers: Brave, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Opera. All research was carried out on a desktop running Windows 10 (version 20H2, build 19042.804) with Microsoft verified accounts.
TLDR: Brave makes the least requests
In 2020, Professor Douglas Leith of Trinity College (University of Dublin) conducted a study of browsers and ranked them according to how well they were at keeping a user's privacy. The first group included Brave as the most private browser, the second - Chrome, Firefox and Safari, the third - Edge and Yandex, which protected user data the worst. Safari and Yandex did not participate in our study, and Opera did not participate in Professor Leith's research, but overall we got similar results.
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