The latest study published the results of network activity of various web browsers including Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Edge, Opera, Brave, Yandex Browser, Ungoogled Chromium, Mulvad, Vivaldi, Librewolf, Arc, Tor Browser, Kagi Orion, Pale Moon, Floorp, Zen, Waterfox, and Thorium. The aim of the research was to evaluate the traffic associated with browsers sending service network requests that are unrelated to the user’s viewed content. These requests are used for telemetry, update availability checks, loading lists of malicious content blockers, and filtering advertising to form the content of the start page.
During the testing, only requests from freshly installed browser copies were considered without any user activity. The study focused on the latest versions of the browsers available at that time. The Kagi Orion, Tor Browser, and Pale Moon browsers did not show any official network activity immediately after launching. However, other browsers established connections with external servers, at least receiving the user’s IP address information.
It was observed that none of the browser requests provided a way for users to opt-out of sending initial data. Although some browsers allow users to disable telemetry transmission in settings, the data is transmitted upon the first launch without giving users the chance to change these settings beforehand.
The distribution of browsers by the number of hosts to which service queries were sent is as follows:
- 82 – Zen
- 48 (21) – Edge
- 42 – Floorp
- 31 (21) – Opera
- 29 (15) – Firefox
- 25 (9) – Chrome
- 24 (3) – Librewolf
- 24 (15) – Yandex Browser
- 21 – Waterfox
- 17 (7) – Brave
- 16 (44) – Arc
- 15 (0) – Mulvad
- 11 (13) – Vivaldi
- 10 – Thorium
- 6 (6) – Safari
- 3 (0) – Ungoogled Chromium
- 0 (0) – Kagi Orion
- 0 (0) – Tor Browser
- 0 – Pale Moon
