You don't want Chrome. Google's ad-revenue parent built it, and the Manifest V3 transition has gutted what uBlock Origin can actually do. You don't want Safari. It's Mac and iOS only, locked to Apple's WebKit, and the company is paid roughly $20 billion a year by Google to keep that the default search engine anyway. You don't want Edge. Microsoft, baked-in Bing and Copilot nudges, aggressive default-browser prompts in Windows.
So: which Chromium-based browser do you actually install?
The answer most readers arrive with is Brave. There are good reasons. Privacy Guides recommends it (with hardening). It's Chromium-compatible, so the sites you use every day work the way they do in Chrome. The adblocker is built in, so you don't need uBlock Origin or Adblock Plus or any extension at all. People you trust have made the switch. By the time anyone is reading a piece called "what keeps your browser free," they have probably already considered Brave.
That's a defensible position. Brave's day-to-day in-browser privacy posture is genuine — Shields blocks third-party trackers and cookies by default, the fingerprinting protections are real, there are no ads in the browser UI itself unless you opt in. None of this is marketing.
But before installing Brave — or any of the other browsers worth comparing — there's a question worth asking: what keeps your browser free?
The answer is documented openly by every browser maker; it's not hidden. But it tends not to be what readers expect, and the specifics matter. Each browser's funding model produces specific frictions in the actual product — in ways that touch the websites you visit, the data those sites can or cannot opt out of contributing, and the question of whether the product you install today will still exist, in three years, in this form.
Brave is the easiest place to start, because the answer there is the most legible.
How Brave gets paid
Brave's revenue lines are public and stack like this. There's Brave Rewards, the BAT cryptocurrency program that lets users opt in to seeing privacy-respecting ads and earning a share. There's Brave Search, which makes money from ads on the search results page and from licensing the search index to other companies through the Brave Search API. There's Brave Leo, the in-browser AI assistant, with a Premium tier at $14.99 a month or $149.99 a year. And there's Brave VPN ($9.99/month or $99.99/year), which is white-labeled — Brave handles billing and the in-browser integration; the underlying infrastructure is provided through a partnership with Guardian (recently acquired by DNSFilter). For current sustainability, the four lines above are the ones that matter.
Most readers know about Brave Rewards. Fewer notice that Brave Search is the more consequential revenue line, because Brave Search isn't only a search engine — it's a dataset that AI companies pay to access. And the way that dataset gets built is where the friction shows up.
From Brave Search's own crawler help page:
The Brave Search crawler does not advertise a differentiated user agent because we must avoid discrimination from websites that allow only Google to crawl them.
And, on the same page:
Note that robots.txt is not used to prevent a page from being indexed.
Read those two sentences together. Brave is saying it deliberately does not identify its crawler in the way robots.txt was designed to expect, because identifying itself would let sites opt out — and sites opting out is the outcome Brave is trying to avoid. Site owners are directed to use the noindex meta tag inside the page itself, which only takes effect after the page has already been fetched.
Brave's Chief of Search, Josep M. Pujol, has been on the record about this for years. In GIGAZINE's coverage of Brave selling search-index data to AI companies, Pujol is quoted saying: "Brave has the right to monetize the output of Brave Search." It's a coherent position — Brave built the index, Brave can sell access to it. But it sits awkwardly with the part of Brave's brand that promises sites are being treated respectfully.
The other half of how the index gets built is the Web Discovery Project. WDP is opt-in and off-by-default in the Brave browser, and Brave has been consistent about that since the 2021 announcement. Users who opt in agree to send anonymized data — search queries, result clicks, URLs visited, time on page, page metadata — back to Brave to feed the search index. The current index claims roughly 30 billion pages with about 100 million updates a day, and WDP is, in Brave's framing, instrumental to those numbers.
The mechanism is the part to notice. Site owners cannot opt out of WDP at the site level, because the fetch happens inside opted-in users' regular browsing sessions. If you visit a site in Brave with WDP enabled, your visit can contribute that page's content to the index. A robots.txt directive cannot reach the user's browser tab.
None of this is a scandal. It is published, and Brave is explicit about every part of it. The 2025 rollout of Brave Rewards 3.0, which moves BAT toward on-chain self-custody payouts and a new partner program, makes it clear that Brave is doubling down on the funding model that produces these dynamics, not winding it down. Brave's path forward is the one it's been on.
The honest question for someone deciding whether to install Brave isn't whether the company has something to hide. It doesn't. The question is whether the specific shape of how Brave pays its bills — a crawler that ignores robots.txt by design, a search index sold to AI customers, a browser that turns opt-in users into part of the indexing infrastructure — is a set of tradeoffs you can live with as a reader, and as someone whose own browsing might end up contributing to that index.
How the others get paid
Brave's funding model produces specific frictions that are easy to point at. Other browsers have their own. The pattern is the structural problem — every browser is paid for somehow, and how it's paid for shapes the product in ways the user doesn't always see.
Mozilla Firefox: a Google-shaped revenue cliff
Mozilla's revenue is roughly 85% from one source: Google's payment for being the default search engine in Firefox. That share has been climbing — about 76% in 2023, around 85% in 2024 — and The Information reported in 2024 that Mozilla's CFO acknowledged publicly that the company's revenue would drop "precipitously" without the deal. The August 2024 Google antitrust ruling has made that cliff a live risk rather than a theoretical one.
Two events from 2025 are visible expressions of the pressure. In late February, Mozilla rewrote Firefox's Terms of Use to grant itself a "nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license" to user-input data, and quietly removed the long-standing "we never sell your data" commitment. The community backlash was immediate; Mozilla revised the language within 48 hours, and explained the deletion of the never-sell line by pointing to the broad California legal definition of sale: "in some places, the LEGAL definition of 'sale of data' is broad and evolving." Then on May 22, Mozilla announced the shutdown of Pocket, the read-it-later app it had acquired in 2017. Pocket went dark on July 8; user data was queued for permanent deletion on November 12.
Mozilla also runs a growing paid subscription business — Mozilla VPN at $4.99/month (powered by Mullvad), Firefox Relay Premium at $3.99/month for email and phone-number masking, Mozilla Monitor Plus at $8.99/month for data-broker delisting across 190+ sites, and a VPN+Relay bundle at $7/month annually. This stack is convergent across the privacy-marketed browser field — Brave sells Leo Premium and Brave VPN, DuckDuckGo sells Privacy Pro, Opera sells VPN Pro. The "private browser company" is increasingly "private browser company plus a privacy subscription bundle," and none of those subscriptions are what the user thinks of when they think of the browser as free.
None of this has shifted Mozilla's revenue picture meaningfully yet; the 85% Google share above is the 2024 number, after years of building the subscription stack. Mozilla's broader diversification through 2024 and 2025 has actually gone toward ad-tech (the acquisition of privacy-preserving ad-targeting company Anonym in mid-2024) and away from consumer products like Pocket. That's not the diversification the brand suggests.
DuckDuckGo: the Microsoft layer underneath
DuckDuckGo is one of the cleaner cases on paper. The company has been profitable for over a decade on contextual search ads with no personal profiling. Its browser is fully free, and there's no paid tier of the browser itself; the optional Privacy Pro subscription ($9.99/month or $99/year) bundles a VPN, data-broker delisting, identity-theft restoration, and access to premium AI models in Duck.ai, but those are separate products.
The friction is structural. DuckDuckGo's web search results syndicate heavily from Bing, and the browser inherits that dependency. In May 2022, researcher Zach Edwards discovered that DuckDuckGo's mobile browser and extensions were allowing certain Microsoft-owned tracking scripts (Bing, LinkedIn) on third-party sites — the syndication agreement carved out advertising-conversion tracking. By August 2022, DuckDuckGo had renegotiated and expanded its blocking, and independent researchers verified the fix. But the underlying Bing relationship that produced the carve-out is still there. If Microsoft changes terms, the product changes shape — that's not a one-time incident, it's a permanent architectural fact.
The browser itself reflects the same Microsoft-adjacent reality in a different way. On Mac, DuckDuckGo Browser is WebKit-based (Safari's engine). On Windows, it's built on Microsoft's WebView2 — essentially a re-skinned Edge with DuckDuckGo's privacy layer on top. So "the DuckDuckGo browser" is two different rendering engines wearing the same logo, and on Windows specifically, it's a closed-source wrapper around a Chromium-based binary controlled by Microsoft. None of this is hidden, but it's also not in the marketing.
The 2022 incident isn't worth relitigating on its own. The point is that even a relatively clean monetization model — search ads, no profiling, a profitable business that predates the browser — sits downstream of Microsoft in ways that bend product behavior. Funding-model friction doesn't require bad intent; it just requires contracts.
Opera: Chinese-consortium control since 2016
In July 2016, the Norwegian company that built Opera sold its browser business to a consortium of Chinese investors (Beijing Kunlun Tech and Qihoo 360, under the vehicle Golden Brick Capital) for around $600 million. Opera has since gone public on NASDAQ as OPRA. As of 2024 and through today, Kunlun Tech owns roughly 69% of the company, and Kunlun's controlling shareholder, James Yahui Zhou, also serves as Opera's executive chairman.
That's the situation, stated neutrally. It's worth knowing if you're considering Opera or its sibling Opera GX as a daily driver — your browsing data, your saved passwords, your sync state all flow through a publicly-listed browser company effectively controlled by an executive who runs a separate Chinese tech conglomerate. Whether that matters depends on the threat model the reader is bringing. Opera also sells Opera VPN Pro at $4 to $8 per month depending on commitment length, alongside the free in-browser VPN tier — so the revenue stack on top of search defaults and ads now includes Aria AI features, the crypto wallet integrations, and the paid VPN upgrade.
Arc and Dia: when venture funding pulls a browser out from under its users
The Browser Company of New York raised more than $175 million to build Arc, a reimagining of the desktop browser that became a cult favorite with a small but dedicated user base. On May 26, 2025, founder Josh Miller published an open letter to Arc members explaining that Arc was being put into maintenance mode. Future development would focus on Dia, a new AI-native browser. Arc would still receive Chromium engine upgrades and security fixes, but no new features.
The unspoken funding-model story is in the adoption stats Miller cited as justification — only 5.52% of daily users used Arc's signature multi-Spaces feature; 0.4% used the Calendar Preview on hover. By contrast, Miller said Dia was already showing 40% daily-active-user adoption for its chat-with-tabs feature. Dia produced the kind of usage curve a venture-backed company can build a future on; Arc didn't. The pivot was the rational outcome of the funding model. Miller wrote: "Traditional browsers, as we know them, will die" — a thesis statement, but also the only way the math worked.
In August 2025, Dia launched Dia Pro at $20/month, the first paid tier — chat-with-tabs without rate limits, custom skills, and so on. Then in October 2025, Atlassian announced an acquisition of The Browser Company for $610 million, and Dia became broadly available on macOS without invitation. As of March 2026, Dia ships integrations with Slack, Notion, Google Calendar, Gmail, and Amplitude — the kind of feature priorities that make sense if your owner is the company that makes Jira and Confluence.
The lesson for readers isn't that Arc was bad. It's that VC-funded browsers carry a specific kind of risk: the funding model can demand a different product before the original product reaches sustainability — and the acquirer of that company can demand a different product still. Anyone who was building their daily workflow around Arc's specific features was a stakeholder whose investment was, by design, secondary to the company's path to product-market fit, and then secondary to whatever Atlassian wants Dia to become.
Vivaldi: small enough to be honest, profitable enough to stay independent
Vivaldi is a Norwegian browser company founded in 2013 by Jon von Tetzchner — co-founder and former CEO of Opera, who left in 2011 after Opera dropped Presto and pivoted away from power-user features — joined by about twenty former Opera employees. Vivaldi is privately held, no VC, with reported revenue of about $6.3 million and a 57-person team in 2025. Its funding model is straightforward: Vivaldi gets paid by search-engine partner deals — DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Qwant, Startpage, Yahoo, Yandex. Notably absent: Google, which doesn't pay Vivaldi anything when users search through it.
There's a lot to like about Vivaldi from a monetization-and-tradeoffs standpoint. No ads. No tracking. No Web3. The same revenue funds free services like Vivaldi Mail, the company's Mastodon instance, and a free blog platform. In March 2025 Vivaldi integrated Proton VPN into the desktop browser — opt-in, free tier with no data limits across five randomly-selected countries, Proton VPN Plus as the paid upgrade for Secure Core and Split Tunneling. That's a real feature for users and a credibility signal in itself: Proton doesn't co-brand with browsers whose privacy posture it couldn't endorse.
The sustainability question cuts both ways. The privately-held, profitable, no-VC structure is itself a sustainability strength: there's no exit pressure of the kind that bent Brave's monetization roadmap or ended Arc as an independent product. The risk in the other direction is engineering scale — can a $6 million, 57-person company keep racing Chromium upstream at its current pace, indefinitely? Vivaldi has so far. Both directions matter for anyone who picks Vivaldi and then expects it to be around in five years.
Safari, Chrome, Edge: the defaults pay differently
The three default browsers most readers are trying to leave each have their own version of the same answer.
Safari is paid for by Google, which pays Apple roughly $20 billion a year (per estimates from antitrust testimony) to remain the default search engine. The browser is also subsidized by Apple's hardware margins; the entire WebKit team is funded by people buying iPhones. The friction is a combination of platform lock-in (WebKit-only on iOS, by App Store policy) and slower adoption of new web platform features, sometimes for legitimate reasons and sometimes not.
Chrome is paid for by Google's ad business; the browser exists to keep Google's search and ad surfaces in front of users. The 2024 transition to Manifest V3 reduced what content-blocking extensions can do, and the full uBlock Origin no longer runs on Chrome — only the reduced-functionality uBlock Origin Lite. That's the friction the funding model produced.
Edge is paid for by Microsoft, primarily as a vehicle for Bing search, Copilot AI, and shopping integrations. The browser's behavior reflects that — aggressive default-browser nudges in Windows, baked-in shopping and coupon features, and a certain unwillingness to leave you alone if you try to install something else.
Each of these is paid for by its parent's existing dominant business. None of them are for you in the way the brand suggests.
The engine tax
The natural objection at this point is: fine, every Chromium-based browser has a monetization story you can pick apart. Just use Firefox. Or Mullvad Browser. Or Tor. Use a browser whose engine isn't owned by Google.
That's a fair instinct. The reason it doesn't quite work is something most reviewers and privacy guides soft-pedal: web developers test Chromium first, file Firefox bugs as second priority, and ship features that work differently or not at all on non-Chromium engines. Some of the resulting Firefox bugs have been open for over a decade. The lived experience of using Firefox or Safari as a daily driver in 2026 is one where some sites work, some sites work but with a degraded UX, some sites break in subtle ways that take a minute to diagnose, and some sites just refuse to load. It might be one site in twenty rather than one in three — but it's enough that you notice it, and over months it adds up.
This isn't an argument against engine diversity. It's an argument that engine diversity is, today, a thing you pay for as a user every day, in micro-frictions, even though the long-term health of the web depends on it.
WebKit-only browsers — Safari and Orion, Kagi's WebKit-based browser — pay an engine tax of their own, smaller than Firefox's because Safari's iPhone share keeps WebKit testing alive, but real. Both are also Apple-only today. Safari is Apple-only by design; Orion ships on Mac and iOS, with Linux and Windows on the roadmap and no announced Android version.
Mullvad Browser and Tor Browser take this further still. Both are designed around anti-fingerprinting defaults — making every user look identical to every other user, so you can't be tracked across sites by your browser's distinctive characteristics. That works only if every user runs the same configuration, so customization is actively discouraged. It also means permanent private browsing mode (no login persistence — you re-authenticate everything every session), aggressive script-blocking that degrades many common sites, and a deliberate refusal to compete on UX features that would differentiate users. They're task browsers, not daily drivers. Privacy Guides puts Mullvad Browser at the top of its desktop browser recommendations, but that ranking is optimized for fingerprinting resistance, not for "browser you can actually use for everything." Many readers' first-week-and-uninstall experience with Mullvad Browser is a real pattern, not a personal failing.
LibreWolf takes the principle one step further by refusing donations entirely. Its FAQ is explicit: "if [we] don't need funding, [we] won't risk becoming dependent on it." That removes the funding-model-creates-friction problem in the cleanest possible way. It also means LibreWolf has zero capacity to fund infrastructure, audits, security response, or any commitment the volunteer team doesn't choose to take on. Sustainability through deliberate fragility — it works as long as enough volunteers keep showing up, and the moment they don't, there is no underlying business to absorb the gap.
Zen Browser and Floorp are both Firefox-based, both donation-funded, and both inherit Firefox's web-compat tax. Zen ships fast — the AI-assisted-development era has compressed the timeline from "Firefox fork takes years to mature" to "Firefox fork ships weekly" — and the question that creates is whether the review depth and security maintenance keep pace with the release velocity. Floorp is explicit about being run on the developer's hobby — a posture of honesty rather than marketing, but also not the foundation you build a five-year browser bet on.
There's one more dynamic worth naming, because it makes the Mozilla situation harder than it looks. Firefox losing market share means web developers test it less, which makes the Firefox UX progressively worse, which makes Mozilla's daily-driver case harder to make to readers, which compounds the Google-revenue cliff. Mozilla can't engineer its way out of that spiral alone. Every reader who switches to a Chromium-based browser, including the privacy-respecting ones, is implicitly contributing to the spiral. There is no easy answer; the only honest move is to surface the tradeoff so readers know they're making it.
Pick two
The pattern across all of these browsers turns out to follow a simple shape. Three things readers want: a browser that is free, a browser with strong privacy, and a browser that is a daily driver — meaning compatible enough that the sites they actually use work the way they expect.
In 2026, you can have any two.
The browsers that are free and strongly private but not daily drivers are Mullvad Browser, Tor Browser, and LibreWolf. They sacrifice daily-driver usability — anti-fingerprinting defaults that break login persistence, aggressive script-blocking that degrades common sites, deliberate refusal of features that would differentiate users — in exchange for genuine, defensible privacy properties. They are excellent at what they're for. They are not what most readers are looking for as the browser they launch every morning.
The browsers that are free and daily-driver but compromise privacy through their funding model are the long list this piece has been describing — Brave, Firefox, DuckDuckGo, Vivaldi, Opera, Edge, Chrome. Each has its specific shape of compromise, and they're not equal. At the severe end: Brave's crawler ignores robots.txt and licenses search data to AI companies, Firefox depends on Google for 85% of its revenue, DuckDuckGo's syndication contract with Microsoft has bent its product behavior, Opera is controlled by an executive of a Chinese tech conglomerate. At the thin end, Vivaldi's compromise is structural rather than behavioral — the default search options shown in the browser reflect which engines pay for placement, not which are best for the user. Each tradeoff is different; each is real; the gradient matters.
The closest existing pick to strongly private and daily-driver but not free is Orion, with the qualification that Orion is WebKit-based and carries the same engine tax as Safari — fewer broken sites than Firefox, more than Chromium, but real. Kagi cross-funds Orion from search subscription revenue, which means somebody is paying — just not necessarily the user choosing Orion. The optional Orion+ tier is $5 a month, $50 a year, or $150 lifetime. Two more caveats sit on top of the engine tax. First, Orion is Mac and iOS only today, with Linux and Windows on the roadmap and no announced Android version, so for most non-Apple readers it isn't yet an available choice. Second, even where the platform fits, the model depends on Kagi remaining profitable as a paid-search company. Whether Kagi's bet that enough people will pay for search to sustain Orion is correct is, again, a live question.
There is a structural reason the daily-driver corner of this triangle has been so narrow. Web developers test Chromium first, ship for Chromium first, and treat other engines as second priority. That means the practical daily-driver set is dominated by Chromium variants — Brave, Vivaldi, DuckDuckGo, Opera, Edge, Chrome — with Firefox and WebKit options carrying the engine tax described above. The market has not produced a Chromium-based browser whose funding model doesn't compromise privacy in some shape. That isn't a moral failure of any one browser team. It's the shape of the field.
Free + strong privacy + daily-driver, in a form most readers would find acceptable, is the corner the market hasn't built — yet. Whether it ever does depends on whether enough users are willing to pay directly to support a browser whose business model isn't downstream of advertising, syndication contracts, AI-data licensing, or venture capital looking for an exit. Orion is the closest existing answer for readers on Apple platforms, with the WebKit engine tax baked in; everyone else navigates the install section's Chromium picks, each with its own shape of compromise. Whether anything else converges on this corner depends on how the next few years play out.
What to install
There is no winner. There is a tradeoff you are already making whether you know it or not, and the most useful thing to do is name the choice plainly.
If your priority is true anonymity, fingerprinting resistance, and you accept task-browser usage, install Mullvad Browser or Tor Browser. Use them for the specific browsing where this matters — research on a sensitive topic, a session you want fully isolated, anything where being indistinguishable from other users is more important than being able to log in to your accounts. Close them when you're done. Don't use them as daily drivers; they aren't designed to be.
If you're a power user who wants productivity tools integrated into the browser, Vivaldi makes the strongest case in the field. The funding posture is unusually clean for a Chromium daily driver — no ads, no tracking, no Web3, search-partner-deal revenue, plus the Proton VPN integration as both a real privacy feature and a credibility signal. The team brings 25+ years of collective browser-building experience (Tetzchner and former Opera engineers), and Vivaldi has held the no-VC, no-ads, no-Web3 posture consistently for over a decade. The built-in feature surface — mail, calendar, RSS, notes, two-level tab stacks, workspaces, mouse gestures, native page translation, panels — is more substantial than what most Chromium browsers ship by default. The tradeoffs are real, and worth weighing seriously: the UI layer is proprietary (Chromium engine is open source, Vivaldi's UI is not, Brave by comparison is fully open source); default tracker/ad blocking is less aggressive than Brave Shields, so you'd want uBlock Origin on top to match; the browser is noticeably heavier on RAM than Brave or stock Chromium because all those built-in features cost something; and the release cadence is slower because it's a 57-person team racing Chromium upstream. Whether this tradeoff profile is the right one depends on what you actually use a browser for.
If you want the simplest daily-driver Chromium with a clean profitable-business funding story and don't need the power-user features, DuckDuckGo Browser is the smaller, lighter pick. Funding comes from search ad revenue that has been profitable for over a decade. The caveat is structural Microsoft dependency — Bing-syndicated search, WebView2-based on Windows — which has bent some product behavior in ways the original DuckDuckGo brand wouldn't have predicted.
If you want a daily-driver with active development velocity and you accept the BAT, crawler, and AI-data-licensing tradeoffs, install Brave. The in-browser privacy posture is genuine. The frictions described in this article are the price. If you do install Brave, Privacy Guides' hardening recommendations are the reference — disable Rewards, disable the wallet, disable Web3 features you don't use, set Shields to Aggressive. That's the version of Brave that makes the most sense for a privacy-curious reader.
If you want to remove the question by paying directly, the cleanest user-pays answer in the field is Orion at $5 a month (or $50 a year, or $150 lifetime) for Orion+. Kagi cross-funds the browser from its search subscription business, which means there's no advertising layer, no syndication contract, and no data-licensing side-business. WebKit-only, so you accept the engine tax. Mac and iOS today; Linux and Windows in development; no announced Android version, so this isn't an option for Android users.
If you want to vote with your usage for engine diversity, use Firefox, accept the web-compat tax as the cost of the vote, and report broken-on-Firefox sites to the developers who run them. Every report is a data point that pushes "Firefox bug" up someone's priority queue, and breaks the spiral described earlier one site at a time — the work helps every Firefox user, not just you. The cleanest single move on the financial side is a Mozilla VPN subscription. Mozilla VPN runs on Mullvad's infrastructure — same WireGuard servers and no-logs policy as direct Mullvad, which itself underwrites the Tor Project's browser engineering — so the privacy quality is independent of Mozilla, and the subscription revenue routes to Mozilla's non-Google diversification. A direct donation to the Tor Project is the other clean path. Using Firefox is a meaningful vote on its own; Mozilla VPN is how you add a financial signal without taking a position on Mozilla's separate product choices.
If you want a single Chromium-based daily-driver that fully resolves the privacy-and-funding-model question, that browser does not exist as of April 2026. Each of the realistic picks fits a different reader: Vivaldi for productivity-oriented power users (proprietary-UI tradeoff); Brave with Rewards, Wallet, and Web3 disabled for default-strong privacy hardening (AI-data-licensing and crawler tradeoffs); DuckDuckGo Browser for the simplest funding story (Microsoft-dependency tradeoff). Anyone trying to make a different choice — Firefox plus hardening, or one of the Firefox forks — accepts the engine tax in exchange. Anyone choosing Orion accepts the user-pays model. Anyone choosing Mullvad Browser or Tor Browser accepts the task-browser usage pattern. Whether something cleaner arrives is an open question. The next few years of the antitrust resolution against Google's search defaults, the trajectory of paid-search alternatives like Kagi, and the willingness of users to pay for a browser whose business model isn't compromised will shape that answer more than any individual product launch.
The choice you are making, every time you open a browser, is which compromise you have decided you can live with. The most useful thing this article can do is make sure you know that's what you're choosing.