“From our perspective, there has been a gap in the market for those who want to run a privacy-focused browser as good as the Tor Project’s but with a VPN instead of the Tor Network,” said Jonsson. As a result, the Mullvad Browser could be described as providing privacy protections similar to the Tor Browser but without Tor.

Mullvad looked to Tor to make a privacy-focused browser because some users might want to get the best possible privacy experience without connecting through the Tor Network and use a VPN instead. “We want to free the internet from mass surveillance and a VPN alone is not enough to achieve privacy.” “The mass surveillance of today is absurd - both from commercial actors like big tech companies and from governments,” said Mullvad VPN Chief Executive Jan Jonsson. However, using a VPN or Tor is not enough to prevent all surveillance, tracking is still possible through cookies, scripts and what is known as “fingerprinting.” Fingerprinting can be done using all manner of things leaked from a user’s browser, such as the device it’s on, the shape of the window and the fonts installed. Using the Tor Browser, users can connect to the network where their traffic is sent through multiple servers before it reaches an exit, which hides their origin from onlookers. It also allows them to hide their IP address from services that they connect to because services only see the exit address of the VPN.Īnother option is the Tor Network, built by the Tor Project, which uses relays to anonymize internet traffic. One way to protect privacy on the internet, users can connect using a VPN, which can be used to encrypt network traffic between users and their internet service provider. The new browser was developed by the Tor team based on the Tor browser to minimize tracking and fingerprinting of users out-of-the-box, according to the announcement today.

The Tor Project Inc., the nonprofit team behind the anonymity-protecting Tor Browser, and commercial virtual private network provider Mullvad VPN AB have teamed up to launch the privacy-preserving Mullvad Browser.

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