I've been experimenting with a browser that I hadn't heard of until mrag put me on the scent, one called Brave.

It's built on the Chromium engine, so if you're a Chrome user, it will feel perfectly familiar. But unlike Chrome, which some tech writers have referred to as "spyware," Brave is dedicated to privacy. It's not gathering information, and it blocks sites from doing so. Instead of having an extension for ad-blocking, for example, Brave has it built in.

They have a weird business model, which some have labeled parasitical. If you turn on "Brave Rewards" (it's disabled by default), the browser will show you its own ads (though not embedded in other pages). In return, you can earn tokens that can be used for other things, like rewarding sites you like. All too complicated for me, so I've left it turned off.

The net result is that you get a browser that loads pages considerably faster than any other browser, because all of the advertising and tracking stuff is being filtered out at a fundamental level. So far, I've run into only one thing that misbehaves, to wit, videos on cnn.com, which refuse to play unless I also set the site to permit autoplay. But doing that also lets their advertising videos get through. I haven't been using it for long, so I might run into other issues - we'll see.

It will happily import things like your bookmarks from Chrome or Firefox, along with stuff like saved logins and passwords - I've had to do almost no "re-training" of the browser. And it can sync all your stuff across multiple platforms - I quickly got the sync working across my Win11 desktop, macOS laptop, and Android phone.

Available for all OS's:

https://brave.com/