Best Private Browsers in 2025

Privacy is really hard to come by when it comes to the internet. We all know this that it's just hard to keep your data safe, keep yourself safe, keep your family safe, and really all you can do is do your best. Now, that's true of anything, but when it comes to security and privacy online, all you really can do is take appropriate measures and kind of hope that that's enough cuz there's no way without being not online to be completely private, to be completely safe. But there are things that you can do. One of those things is use a privacy focused browser. So, what I want to do today is talk about five of the best privacy focused browsers. Now let's talk a little bit about criteria to be on the list. First I'm going to make it so you have to be open source fully open source not open source or source available like Vivaldi. Now Vivaldi is my personal choice for browser but it's not going to be on this list even though I do think that it qualifies in most of the other criteria. It's just not open source. It is source available and that's just not good enough. So, Vivaldi is not going to be on the list even though it's my personal choice. But other than that, a few things that I want to make sure that all these browsers do. One, they claim to be privacy focused. Two, they have settings that enable you to at least make yourself more secure if those things aren't enabled out of the box. Some of them will be, some of them won't be. We'll talk about that. And you've at least tried to do something about ad blocking or you have the ability to do something about ad blocking. Now, some of these have ad blocking stuff built in. Some of them you have to do that on your own, but at least you have the capabilities. Whereas with like something like Chrome, that capability has gone away somewhat at least because of manifest v3. So, those are the criteria to be on the list. Some of them I've fudged just a little bit. We'll talk more about that, but I think they come close enough. So, let's go ahead and jump in. The first one we're going to start off with, the one I think everyone should use, and that is Firefox itself. Now, Firefox, as you'll see in the B-roll, is just Firefox. It looks like Firefox. It acts like Firefox. Everyone knows what Firefox is. So, I don't really have to spend a ton of time here, but there are some things that you should know out of the box. It's not a privacy focused browser. There are some things you have to do. So, first you'll have you need to make sure that strict browsing is enabled. It should be by default, but doesn't necessarily mean that it is. And you have to disable the telemetry that Mozilla enables by default. Now, I don't think that there's anything shady about this telemetry. It's just sending the minimum amount of data back, but if you're privacy focused, you don't want any telemetry, but you can turn that stuff off, as you'll see me do in the B-roll. It's the only browser, as far as I know, on this list that actually has telemetry. I may be talking outside of my mouth when it comes to Brave a little bit. I'm not sure if they do, but I'm pretty sure though that that's the case. So, yes, technically out of the box, not a privacy focused browser, but you can make it into one fairly reasonably. And there are user profiles available online that help you truly harden Firefox into as secure a browser as it can be. So, if you go googling and find one of those profiles, I'll leave a couple links in the video description where you can make it basically make it a hardened shell so that you can be as private as possible. So, Firefox is number one on the list. Number two on the list is Waterfox. Now, I have not used Waterfox extensively, so I can't tell you too much about it other than what I've heard and what I've experienced and what little I have used of it. But there are some good things and bad things about Waterfox. First, again, it proclaims itself to be a private web browser. And because it's based on Firefox, it has all the things Firefox can do to become a private browser. They have disabled or totally removed the telemetry that Firefox has by default. They have private tabs and private search, although I'm going to call BS on that last one. We'll talk about that here in a second one. and they've done some work with DNS in order to make that not as default as it is for most browsers. So, let's talk about some of the downsides of Waterfox just real quick. First, for whatever reason, at least when I downloaded it, the default search engine was Bing. So, um what I don't know really we came very close to completely not making a list because of that. So, I don't know why they did that. Maybe they've made a deal. Maybe they're getting some money. I hope that they're getting money because they've made made a deal with the devil, but you can change that. So, I didn't disqualify them for that, although I thought about it. And another thing, for whatever reason, they have set their browsing mode to standard. Even Firefox said it sets it to strict out of the box. So, if you want a truly strict browsing profile, things like blocking trackers, blocking fingerprinting, and all that stuff, you have to do that on your own. It's not done for you out of the box. So, just keep that in mind. Waterfox is a privacy focused browser, but unlike some of the other ones, you do kind of have to do a little bit more work in order to get it to be there. So, we'll put it on the list, but we're putting it here at the beginning. The next one on the list is Libre Wolf. Libre Wolf is also based on Firefox. You'll notice a trend here. And Libre Wolf is what Waterfox, I think, wants to be. It's very much more privacy focused right out of the box. a lot of stuff there that you're just going to be happy about if you're into privacy. Things like ad blocking built in things like just being a very toned down, no frrills browser. It does what it does. In fact, it shuts things down so hard a lot of the stuff kind of needs to be turned off if you want to have it functional. But if you're into the privacy thing, it does probably the best job out of the box out of all the browsers I talked about today in actually being private. Again, it's based on Firefox, so it's very familiar. A lot of the settings that it has are much more in-depth than what Firefox itself offers. So, you can go in and a enable more secure features that you'd have to go into a config file in order to do with Firefox or the config panel or whatever. So, you can really nail down your security and privacy in Libé Wolf where you can't in a lot of these other browsers. It does come with the downside of a lot of that stuff being enabled by default, which means some things just aren't going to work on the internet. Things like being able to remember that you're signed in. That's kind of like disabled by default. So, you have to kind of go and kind of make it less secure in order to make it more usable. So, if you're going to be running multiple browsers and you want one to be absolutely secure, or at least the most secure it can be, I think Libre Wolf is probably the best option for you or maybe the one I'm talking about next, mostly because it does give you those big options for controlling your privacy and security settings. So, Libre Wolf is very, very good. The next one on the list is Molvad. Now, Malvad is a browser that is done with Marlvad and partnered with Tor. And one of the reasons why it's on this list is because of its partnership with Tor. They've done a really, really good job of making a very minimal browser. Again, based on Firefox, and it also has quite a few privacy settings built in. It does have standard browsing as the default profile. So, if you want more strict browsing profiles, you'll have to enable it on your own. But it does make it more usable in my opinion than Libre Wolf out of the box in terms of convenience. So I think that Molvad is very good if you're going to be using it with MulvanVPN or without. It does do a good job without. But I would still say if you're using MolvadVPN, this is the browser you probably should be using. Also, they have set their own search engine. I don't know what it's based on or if they've coded it themselves. I'm not sure how good it is, but if you do a search, as you'll see in the B-roll, they do have their own search engine. So, there's that as well. It has some of the tour things built in. It's not the same, as far as I'm aware, as actually using the tour browser. So, if you want tour, just go use the tour browser, but it does have some of the tour things built in. So, you can kind of get the best of both worlds. It's not quite as customizable as Libre Wolf in terms of privacy settings, but it does have more than something like Waterfox or Firefox. So, it kind of lives there in the middle. So, that's Mulvad Browser. The last one that I'm going to talk about is one that I didn't really think about or wanting to put on the list this list when I first come up with this idea, and that's Brave Browser. Now, people who use Brave browser will tell you that it is a privacy focused browser, and I think that it is, but there's also some shadiness there that goes on and that you kind of hear about things surrounding web 3 and a lot of stuff. But the good news is all of that stuff is has the ability to be disabled. So, if you want to disable the crypto nonsense, you can do that. And it does have a lot of settings for making your web browsing experience more private. So that's why it's on the list. It's also the only browser on this list that is Chromiumbased. So if you want the internet to work the best it can work, you'll probably want to use something like Brave because the web is meant to be used in Chrome. It sucks that it's that way, but it is. And we just have to kind of live in that world that we've created. So, if you need to use something Chromebased, but you want a privacy focused browser that is open- source that seems to do a fairly good job of offering you options to be private, Brave is a good option. Now, again, you kind of have to meander your way around the web 3 stuff, and that's a bummer, but if that's how they want to make their money, that's fine. They also run their own search engine, which is Brave Search. And to be honest with you, Brave Search is pretty damn good. I don't use it my own self my own self but I have used it a little bit when I need to use something that's a little bit more hefty than what Cirs offers and not only is it welldesigned but it seems to function just as well as Google does when it comes to actually offering you results that matter. So if you are looking to pair your browser and your search engine Brave is probably the best combo there for a lot of people. So definitely check that out. Now, I'm not a big fan of the Chrome UI, and definitely Brave uses the Chrome UI. I I just don't care for it. So, I prefer if I'm going to use one of these browsers, I prefer the Firefox way of looking and feeling. But to each their own, if you are used to using Chrome and you want that look and feel, Brave is the option for you. Now, there is one other browser on this list that's more of an honorable mention because it's definitely not for everyone and it doesn't meet the requirements that I really wanted to have in order to be like usable. And that's cute browser. Cute browser is a very very good browser, but it's keyboard ccentric. It's doesn't have a lot of Chrome there. So, it doesn't have like you know buttons all over the place. All of the configuration stuff is done either via very rudimentary menus or in a configuration file. So if you're not comfortable configuring stuff in a configuration file, you're not going to like it. Also, if you're not used to navigating the web via your keybindings and a lot of Vim keybindings at that, you're also not going to like it. So I didn't want to say this, you know, and put this for everybody, but I will say that it is a very open- source browser. It's based on WebKit. I believe it's based on WebKit. Anyways, it might be, you know, I don't actually know what it's based on. I know it's something like that. But anyways, it is a really good, very minimal browser. The problem is, and the reason why, other than the keyboard ccentric nature of it, why I can't recommend it to everybody is because the ad browsing is just terrible. There's no extension support whatsoever. There is some built-in ad blocking, so it does kind of fit the criteria for this list. But as you'll see in the B-roll, it doesn't work very well with video. It does very good with web ads, like surprisingly good, but for whatever reason, it won't block a YouTube video to save its life. Now, if you're like me and you subscribe to YouTube Premium because you seem to have to these days, that won't be a big deal for you because you just don't see ads anyways. But if you aren't signed in or you don't pay for YouTube Premium, you're going to see YouTube ads if you're on YouTube. What I would recommend you do is set up a keybinding that will allow you to browse YouTube and then open the video in something like MPV. You can do that within the configuration file and that will help you bypass the ads altogether at least until YouTube starts building the ads into the stream itself. So, and and yes, that's coming. But until that does, you can at least use the MPV workaround to get around the very bad video ad blocking in cute browser if that's the browser you've chosen to use. It also just kind of as a side note, allows you to control more of the privacy stuff on your own end and you you kind of have to have that knowledge. So, just keep that in mind. It's more of a build your own privacy experience than any of the rest of them offer. So Cube Browser is just kind of an honorable mention for the super nerds amongst you. Also, if you haven't already, hit the subscribe button because I do plan on doing a revisit of Cube Browser. So, I'll be doing a whole video on that. Just again, subscribe if you haven't already so you don't miss it. All right, so that's it for this one. If you have any other browsers that you'd like to share or you'd have experiences with these browsers that you'd like to share, leave those in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me on Masedon. That link will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com/lennxcast. There you'll find weekly exclusive podcasts that I record for my supporters. Usually, it's just me sitting down for 10 or 15 minutes rambling about things that I'm working on or whatever. So, if you're interested in that kind of rambling, head on over there, give me some support. I'd really appreciate it if you can do so. If you'd like to get something else in return for your support, you can get a cool hat like this Linux nerd hat or the I love them hat is also up on the store along with all sorts of other merchandise. 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