Yandex Browser Beta with privacy enhancements published
Yandex published a beta version of its minimalist browser today that it first revealed back in 2014.
The interface has not changed much on first glance, but the switch from alpha to beta introduces a new set of privacy enhancements and features in the browser.
One of the bigger changes in the beta version is a new Stealth Mode extension that the browser ships with. The extension is off by default but linked directly in the browser's main toolbar.
Stealth Mode blocks online trackers when enabled. It is not an ad-blocker and works similar to the tracking protection feature that Mozilla plans to integrate into its Firefox browser.
The extension is developed by Adguard, a company best know for its ad-blocking extensions for various browsers.
Stealth Mode comes with a set of options of which several are enabled by default. It blocks social widgets and third-party cookies by default for instance, and ships with options to hide the user-agent, IP address and referrer from third parties as well.
Yandex Browser ships with a large number of preinstalled extensions including Adguard, an ad-blocker by the same company, the Web of Trust site reputation tool and a Flash blocker.
All extensions with the exception of the bug reporting extension are off by default.
Another privacy related change is that the browser is not collecting behavioral information on how the browser is being used. The company has created a help page indicating that some features still require the sending of data but provides instructions on how to disable those in the browser.
For instance, crash reporting is enabled by default but can be turned off under Settings > Privacy. The same goes for navigational errors, search and address suggestions, and the browser's phishing and malware protection feature.
The company made additional changes, for instance to the safe browsing technology used by the browser. Instead of sending full urls to Yandex to find out if a site is safe to visit, the browser sends only a hash to make that check.
The browser displays three search engines on start to the user of which one can be selected to become the default search engine.
Yandex Browser scores almost as well as Google Chrome on HTML5Test with 520 out of 555 points and the Octane Benchmark test.
The final stable version of Yandex Browser can be downloaded for Windows and Mac OS X from the official project website.
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.