I started looking for Android browsers that allowed for private browsing and found a whole slew of them. Far more than I can test.
1. If you do a search for 'browser private' on the Google Play store you will find a bunch. The Orweb browser caught my eye because it can utilize Tor , but so can others.
2. I took a different tack and searched Play store for browsers mentioning the search engine Duckduckgo, which uses privacy as a major selling point. My thinking was that browsers that allowed DDG as a default search engine might also be serious about privacy.
I found two that I like: Easy Browser Pro and Exsoul Browser
So far Easy Browser is winning in my comparison testing, especially on the phone. It is so bare-bones simple but still has the search features I want, especially for a phone, but also for tablet. It behaves well when I want to copy a URL from the address bar, which can be important when you want to post to forums. Try the free version and upgrade to Pro if you like what you see.
Exsoul is also decent. However, I'm fighting with it to copy a URL from the address bar. So far I've not figured it out.
My old standby was Opera, which does not phone home to the môthership like Chrome. But android Opera only let's you set up one of the big three search engines, G, Y!, B, all of whom are tracking you and sort of defeats the purpose.
Has anyone else got recommendations for private browsers for Android?
Aren't the word combination "Android" and "privacy" a complete oxymoron?
Quote from: I, Brian on June 13, 2013, 12:49:00 PM
Aren't the word combination "Android" and "privacy" a complete oxymoron?
Hard to say. You can make it more private by not using Chrome or the default browser, not using Google search, mail or other services. Can you make it completely private, probably not.
Of the major handset OS's probably Blackberry is the most buttoned down. You do your best with what you got.
Orweb is an EFF project at least. Do you find these other browsers perform better?
There's always the option of SSH tunnelling and using that as a socks proxy in your browser. That and 'private browsing' so the cache & cookies dont give any/less fingerprints away between sessions.
Orweb using Tor is understandably slow. The browser is fairly spartan, but it works.
Easy Browser Pro has a way to use For also but I have not figured it out or looked up instructions. However, you can set it to keep no history which is good. It crashes a bit on some web pages so testing continues. Right now Easy Browser Pro is my default on my cell. Both browsers let me set the https version of DuckDuckGo as my search and DDG keeps no record of what I search for so there is nothing to data mine.
There are a whole bunch of other apps, like encrypted notebook apps, that could be useful for journalists, but I don't really need such. Organizations like Project Guardian with the support of EFF have all sorts of apps.