7 BEST Security and Privacy Android Browsers for Mobile

Private and Secure mobile browsing. I found 7 android web browsers that put privacy and security first. Checking any statistical data year over year shows that mobile website traffic is growing.

Chances are, most folks are just using the built in web browser to get online - whether that is Google’s Chrome or Apple’s Safari - but these are not the most secure or private mobile web browsers available.

You can replace your default web browser with a third party one downloaded from the Google Play Store or Apple’s App Store. But which one can you trust? Which one blocks trackers the best? Do any of them protect you from location tracking? How fast are they? Convenience and reliability is key for introducing any privacy-focused product to the general public, so let’s look at these not from a privacy absolutionist perspective, but from a “I’m tired of fixing my family’s phones” perspective.

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Here are 8 mobile browsers you should take a look at for security and privacy in 2023. I tested these with speed and convenience in mind, but also looked for privacy and security centric features that made them stand out compared to the competition:

1. Brave Browser: I had no issues watching youtube and this browser blocked ads in videos, and it asked to block cookie consent notices. The settings setup is very similar to Chrome, so it’s easy to find options like private tabs, bookmarks, etc. Brave uses their own brave search engine and is one of the few to give you a specific number count of blocked trackers and ads. Like here I blocked 72 trackers on m.youtube.com. They have default blocking of trackers and ads, cookies, and fingerprinting. But it is based on Chromium. Brave is good for entertainment since it can also do background audio.

2. DuckDuckGo doesn’t block youtube ads or ads on page. And it doesn’t have a lot of settings to change. No indication of how many trackers it’s blocking. But it is easy to find your bookmarks and other settings. DDG has this neat feature called fireproofing and it will whitelist a site’s cookies and keep you signed into that site even after you close the browser or use the fire button. Usually closing the browser will erase all cookies. DDG can also manage cookie popups. And there’s a setting called Global Privacy Control that can send a request to a website to restrict selling or sharing your data.

3. Next is Firefox which doesn’t block youtube ads in video or on website. The data collection defaults to on for things such as usage and technical data and marketing data. One Feature I liked was Enhanced Tracking Protection which keeps trackers and scripts from following you. Google is default browser. Add Ons are fully featured. History isn’t cleared unless using the private tabs which you can find through the mask icon. Firefox doesn’t use Chromium, and instead is built on their own platform called the Quantum browser engine.

4. Firefox Focus also doesn’t block ads in youtube vids. But it does block webpage ads. One cool feature is that you can lock the app and unlock it with your fingerprint. The default search engine is google. It clears your search history when you close the app. Settings are all pretty easy to understand, and it can block trackers, javascript, web fonts, and cookies. You can also choose which kind of cookies you’d like to block. There’s an HTTPS only mode and you can block potentially malicious sites. Firefox Focus is open source and based on Firefox.

5. Next is Aloha. This one has a VPN included, it includes the Adblock Plus plugin automatically, and you can further customize your blocking preferences in the settings. You can also lock your private “secret” tabs with a passcode or fingerprint. Optionally, you can create an Aloha Profile to sync data across devices. Searches are defaulted to a private search engine, you can set up a passcode for the app. HTTPS Everywhere is not enabled by default but you can enable this. One thing to make note of is that Personalized Ads are enabled, which means your device ID is shared with advertisers. These are quote “randomly generated unique device IDs”. The Ad Block is also not enabled by default and needs to be turned on. There are prompts here and there asking you to buy Premium, which comes with a faster VPN service and some other perks but the ads aren’t intrusive. Aloha is built on Chromium.

6. Next is Ghostery and it does remember your tabs when you reopen it but you can force it to close them after specific periods of time, and the search engine defaults to Ghostery Glow. Ghostery Tab is like the incognito mode for this browser and HTTPS Only mode is disabled by default. You can also tell it to delete browsing data when you quit. Youtube ads in video and on the page are both blocked.

7. Opera uses Google as it’s default search engine, and automatically blocks in video and webpage ads on youtube. The settings are easy to understand and it does show you a count of how many ads the browser has blocked for you. Theres a VPN built in which you can enable, along with tracker and cookie controls. There’s a quick settings tab that pops up from the little person icon at the bottom and I like how quick and seamless it is to enable the VPN and ad blocking. Opera is also based on Chromium.

8. Of course, the last one on my list is the Tor Browser. This one doesn’t let you record the screen or take screenshots so pardon my not-so-fancy video. Tor definitely has a time and place for privacy absolutionist use cases, but it’s speed really deters me from recommending it for most people, because the convenience drops. It also didn’t block ads in youtube videos or pages in my testing by default. Tor Browser is great for the upmost privacy, but I think the speeds will deter most people.

So how did these do in terms of speeds? All of these were tested at the same time on 5G in Denver and here they are all side by side. You can see that only a couple of them tracked around 100 down, many of them sat between 50 megs to around 80 megs down. And a few of them were pretty slow.

Brave Browser Speedtest: 103.42 Mbps down

DuckDuckGo: 72.83 Mbps down

Firefox Browser: 46.81 Mbps down

Aloha Privacy Browser: 97.16 Mbps down

Ghostery Private Browser: 82.80 Mbps down

Firefox Focus: 19.83 Mbps down

Opera: 75.09 Mbps

Vivaldi: is it open source: 100.89 Mbps down

Kiwi: 48.13

Tor Browser: 1.58 Mbps down

Avast: 14.73 Mbps

There are 3 in this speedtest that I didn’t include in my best list, those were Avast, Vivialdi, and Kiwi.

Vivaldi uses Bing for search, but strangely youtube video ads are completely blacked out instead of skipped and disabled. It does block the website ads. In the settings, there aren’t a lot of customizations you can do for security and privacy, and these settings are kind of buried which makes me feel like these are a second thought. There’s no VPN built in, and only two main settings pages for sec/priv. Vivaldi is built on Chromium.

Kiwi doesn’t block video ads on youtube, and the default search engine is bing. Kiwi also doesn’t have a VPN built in and it doesn’t have many security and privacy settings that you can customize. Kiwi is based on Chromium and is certainly lightweight, but I don’t feel like security and privacy are major features.

Avast: Immediately scans your phone and gives you warnings about vulnerabilities and pushes an upgrade on you. Hit back to start browsing. Speeds were slow and it also doesn’t alert that site is requesting location data. This one is a hard pass and I cannot recommend it.

So, there’s 11 quick looks at the security and privacy features of these browsers, 3 of which I don’t really recommend, some of which have more privacy than others. I think there’s one for everyone and hey, the best part is, you don’t have to use just one. If you find you want to use Brave for most things but want to use Tor for banking… then go for it! I downloaded all of these on my phone and used them all at the same time.

Check out this video for more security and privacy tips, or this video that youtube thinks you’ll like. Bye yall!