Sphere Browser is a privacy-focused web Browser made by Tenebris.
This program was tested with MITMproxy on Linux. Sphere Browser itself does not contain any telemetry and really has removed all of the spyware from the chromium codebase that it is based on. However, it has two red flags- the default homepage has analytics, and you have to run analytics on your browser to download it. The software is fine. Just the settings and the way you have to download it and the lack of source code hold it back from the title of "Not Spyware". You can easily configure it to not connect to the default homepage, at least.
Sphere Browser is based around an "identities" feature that lets you
change how your browser appears to the rest of the internet in a rather
easy way- and then it by default loads the site
f.vision which can identify your new identity in a pretty
centralized way, and even includes a tracking pixel from the getclicky
analytics service. If you want to use this browser, you really should not
be using this default homepage. It contrasts with the privacy features of
the browser rather poorly.
Another problem is, you need to load JavaScript to download the browser
itself at sphere.tenebris.cc/, which tries to load JS code from Tenebris
as well as JavaScript from the same analytics company that has the
tracking pixel on f.vision. Why are these analytics here if
the browser is so focused on privacy?
This article was last edited on 12/12/2018
If you want to edit this article, or contribute your own article(s), visit us at the git repo on Codeberg. All contributions must be licensed under the GPLv3 to be accepted.