DNS over HTTPs will mask the sites you visit from your internet provider and anyone who happens to be snooping on your connection. If all the above hasn’t convinced you to switch browser, there’s a big step you can take in Chrome to protect your surfing privacy.

This does make browser sync a little trickier - you need a separate encryption password to sync data between browsers - but it does offer far greater privacy. Even when synchronizing bookmarks and browsing history across Vivaldi browsers on different devices, all that information is encrypted and not stored by Vivaldi. What’s more, Vivaldi itself doesn’t store information such as your bookmarks or browsing history, unlike Google when you use Chrome. Do you really want Google knowing all of this stuff? If, for example, you start typing the name of your bank to access the saved bookmark for its website, that data will be sent back to Google (or another search engine). This too is done for privacy reasons, because all that data is sent back to your default search provider. You might notice search suggestions - where the browser tries to guess what you’re searching for when you type the first few letters - is also turned off by default in the address bar. If you access the Vivaldi settings, for example, under the Privacy tab you’ll find the option to Block Trackers, or even Block Trackers and Ads, in any session. Vivaldi also has greater privacy protections built into the browser. It minimizes what’s stored on disk, instead relying on the computer’s memory to store critical information, so that when the session is ended there’s little chance of anyone later recovering what you were surfing for by scanning temporary disk files, for instance.

Vivaldi also goes to greater lengths to stop any trace of what you’re surfing for in Private Windows being left behind on the computer.

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