A: Great question! Few people ever give thought to the browser they are using, and just grab the one in front of them.

Let’s start with the 800 pound gorilla in the room–Chrome.

Google created an open source browser called Chromium. There are dozens of browser available that are based on Chromium, Chrome is one of them. So Google started with open source code, and then added their own proprietary code to make Chrome. Chrome is one of the most full-featured browsers available. The bad news is that it comes configured to feed everything you do on the web to Google as part of its data harvesting. Even if you install all the right extensions to improve the security and privacy of Chrome, there is no way to stop all of its harvesting of your data.

Brave is also based on Chromium. The big difference between Brave and Chrome is that Brave ships with almost all security settings properly configured to help ensure a secure and private internet experience. Brave has been one of my three favorite secure browsers from the day it was released. Because it is based on Chromium, it can use almost every extension that is available to Chrome. Unfortunately, because the underlying framework is Chromium, there may be no way to completely prevent Brave from sending some of your data to Google.

Firefox is not based on Chromium. This is huge. Of all the major browsers in the current market, it is the only major player to do so. This plus being open source helps to make Firefox very secure (no secret data harvesting to Google). Although there are many extensions to expand the functionality of Firefox, it cannot use Chrome extensions.

So, which is the most secure? Out of the box, Brave is far more secure than Firefox. However, if you are willing to install maybe three extensions and manually configure the preference settings, I think the nod may go to Firefox.