Friday, September 01, 2006

Secure Browzar

There is a long post about how this browser may not be all that it seems. It was touted as having no install and that it did not save information from visited websites. According to that post, digg comments, another post and another, it is a simple IE wrapper and appears to do little to improve privacy against a knowledgable user. It became really popular all the sudden this week and if this is true a lot of people could be installing it and getting a false sense of security. It may be effective against casual snooping, but it isn't going to protect your browsing habits from the FBI or your hacker friend.

Clearly people really want privacy and security, but Firefox already offers built in options to do that. Plus for even more privacy you can get Portable Firefox and/or the Stealther extension.

I have not tried Browzar to confirm this for myself, but if you do you should know what you are getting or not getting. As one of the above posts said, this could be just a mistake or a few bugs and future versions will work as advertised, but for now it doesn't appear to be as good as it sounds.

Update: BBC News did a story pointing out that many believe Browzar to be adware and that it doesn't work. In it, the developers respond that it is not adware and that they want to fix anywhere the browser is leaving behind traces.

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