01
September
2006
|
01:43 AM
America/Los_Angeles

Private surfing with Browzar



The BBC reports on Browzar, a privacy browser that operates as a shell on top of Internet Explorer. Unlike IE, Firefox, Safari or most any other browser, Browzar doesn't save surfing history, cache visited pages, or cookies beyond the browsing session.



We've had downloads from over 200 countries," said Mr Ajaz Ahmed, founder of internet service provider Freeserve and the man behind Browzar. "All sorts of people are using it: teenagers, mums and grandparents. Many don't realise that their browser doesn't offer them privacy and they learn the hard way."


None of this is rocket science - all browsers let you disable all of these settings in a preferences dialog. Yet, few people do it. So maybe a new browser is what's needed. But because it sits on top of IE, Browzar still exposes users to all the same security flaws that the underlying Microsoft browser faces.

- Richard Koman