Browser privacy: should you switch from Chrome?

Every time you search the internet, visit a website or make an online booking, an invisible host of data firms, digital marketers and more are tracking every click you make.

Take the dailymail.co.uk, one of the most popular sites in the UK that serves ads. If you click ‘Got it’ on the cookies warning, more than 1,400 companies – from advertising to analytics – are activated by default. 

Cookies and trackers aren't necessarily 'bad' and are used for a variety of reasons. This can include remembering what item you've added to a shopping basket, measuring what content is popular so a website can be improved, and to build a profile of you to show relevant ads. But not everyone wants to be spammed with ads and tracked extensively as result of what they’re browsing online. 

Choosing the right web browser setup can help you surf the web in relative peace, but doing so is not without downsides. Read on for the results of our in-depth browser privacy test. 

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Google Chrome, and why you should use plug-ins

If you’re using Chrome and have it set on the default version, then we know from our tests that your browser is blocking only the very minimum in terms of advertising panels, cookies and trackers. 

Chrome is the UK’s leading browser, accounting for nearly 50% of all users. If this includes you, you might be loath to stop using Chrome – maybe you have bookmarks, settings and your Google account all set up as you want, and don’t want to switch. Maybe you just like it.

Well, you could consider using a plug-in, which is a bit like a phone app for your browser. There are plug-ins for almost everything, and that includes software tools to reduce adverts on websites and increase your privacy against trackers and digital marketers.

All the plug-ins we tested with Chrome – AdBlock, Privacy Badger, Ghostery, DuckDuckGo and NoScript – successfully removed ads from the eight websites we used for testing. These were mostly cut from the top and sides of the page. 

All these plug-ins also successfully blocked or removed trackers from the websites. Ghostery blocked the most, followed by Privacy Badger and DuckDuckGo. 

The added bonus was that with all this removed, websites loaded quicker. DuckDuckGo loaded a Daily Mail page in 3.3 seconds, compared to 7 seconds with default Chrome. 

You could even try combinations of plug-ins, as most are free to use. If you find that they are slowing down your browser, though, it might be better to just stick to one or two being active at any one time. 

You can go to the plug-ins websites to download them and try them out: AdBlock, Privacy Badger, Ghostery, DuckDuckGo, NoScript. 

Brave, Edge and Firefox

Alongside the Chrome plug-ins we tested, only the Brave browser actually removed any advertising panels, banners and other items on the eight websites we used in our test. 

If you're privacy conscious and want a reasonably locked-down browser for daily use, it's worth switching to Brave (you can download it from brave.com). It excelled in our test and is also simple to install and familiar to use.

Alongside Brave, Edge (download from the Microsoft site) and Firefox (download from Mozilla's site) also blocked cookies. Chrome let 138 be active on The Guardian's website, whereas just 47 were active when browsing to it in Edge. It's worth bearing in mind, though, that cookies aren't necessarily bad and can even be useful (scroll down to read more about the downsides of ad blockers).

Microsoft’s Edge also removed the most trackers on the Daily Mail website:

• 79 – Microsoft Edge 
• 58 – Brave 
• 52 – Chrome with Privacy Badger 

We monitored data being downloaded and uploaded by websites. This factors into how quick the page loads, and how much data the website is requesting. Again, Brave and Chrome with the plug-ins activated vastly cut down on data upload and download across the websites on test. 

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Mac users: Safari, Brave and more

If you're a macOS user who switched from the default Safari browser to Chrome, changing over to Brave or back to Safari blocks more trackers and removes advertising items.

We were particularly impressed with the combination of Safari and Ghostery. This setup removed 192 advertising items when visiting dailymail.co.uk. 

Apple also has other tricks up its sleeve for increasing your privacy. In Safari, on both macOS and iOS, your IP address is hidden from known trackers. This is intended to make you more anonymous at a network level.

Mobile: best browsers for iOS and Android

A lot of our lives are now lived on our phones, and online tracking and advertising is active there, too.  

We looked at the most popular browsers on Android phones and would advise switching to Brave, if you haven’t already. 

Brave removes most items, such as ads and pop-ups. Compared with standard Chrome, it also nearly halves the load time on popular websites.

For iPads and iPhones, we'd recommend the same configuration as with Macs: Safari with Ghostery as an add on (via the Apple App Store). 

What's the downside of ad blockers?

Although they won’t completely stop you from being tracked, ad blockers will make a positive difference to your browsing experience. However, there is one big downside to bear in mind. 

When buying tickets for a concert, live sport or a flight, your purchase is typically only held for a short time while you’re on the site. Having ad blocking and filtering can sometimes cause the page interaction to fail when you’re about to click confirm. This can be frustrating and even result in you missing out. 

You will also miss out when you use a cashback site, as these rely on cookies to track you.

A solution is to have a second browser on your computer without ad-blocking software. You can use this purely for booking tickets and other similar activities, and just accept that during those sessions you will see ads and be tracked. 

You can then return to the confines of a more privacy-protecting browser setup for general web surfing.

How we tested ad blockers 

Our goal with this research was to see if different browser variations cut down on the number of ads you see on popular websites, and (within limitations) the amount of tracking that takes place. 

We also wanted to see if there were any negatives to that – for example, lots of annoying warning messages or websites so stripped back that they were unstable. 

To do this, we selected some of the highest-traffic websites in the UK that also have marketing ads, including dailymail.co.uk, guardian.com/uk, newsnow.co.uk, nytimes.com, argos.co.uk and booking.com. 

We visited each site regularly and recorded the results (items removed, page load time, data uploaded and downloaded, and more) over a period of weeks to ensure we got a realistic spread of results to aggregate. 

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