Yandex Releases Beta Version Of Its Browser, With Privacy Turned On By Default

[engine]

Privacy is the message that Yandex wants to get across with a new beta version of its browser.
The default options, and the ease of setting stealth mode is likely to attract many users.

To meet the expectations of those users who would like to have more control over their digital footprint, we’re now rolling out a much more private beta version of the experimental Yandex.Browser, available in 15 languages, including English, German, Portuguese, Spanish and French. Yandex Releases Beta Version Of Its Browser, With Privacy Turned On By Default [company.yandex.com]

Unlike in most browsers, sending the information about users’ behaviour to the developer (i.e. Yandex) in the private version of Yandex.Browser is disabled by default. While sharing browsing history and web cache can in principle be disabled in other browsers, this opportunity isn’t normally offered as a default option.

In addition to data sharing disabled by default, Yandex.Browser provides the ‘Stealth Mode’ option, which blocks analytics cookies, sharing plugins etc. This mode is activated by clicking a button conveniently located right next to the browser’s ‘smartbox’, a combined search and address bar, at the top of the screen.

[browser.yandex.com...]

Previous story Yandex Releases a New Alpha Version of its Browser [webmasterworld.com]

[blend27]

from [help.yandex.com...]
In the Cookie files section, set the desired parameters for handling cookies. You can allow storing cookies, allow saving them only for the current session (when the session is over, cookies will be deleted), or not allow storing cookies at all. You can also block cookies from third-party websites, but after this, the sites might not be able to function properly.

This is a cool-aid approach.

Privacy by default means no third party cookies or content, no beacons, zip.

[keyplyr]

Using what said was the Alpha but turned out to be the Beta. It's fast, lean & clean looking.

UA on a Win7 machine:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.118 YaBrowser/15.4.2272.3649 (beta) Yowser/2.0 Safari/537.36

The stealth feature will be a favorite, but probably not for webmasters tracking site visitors. I prefer the Classic mode. There's something eerie about not having the location bar at the top. Don't see a lot of options to customize look. Not liking where the bookmarks display.

[nomis5]

Just tried it out and its superb. Fast, relatively ad free and good results. G and Bing need to watch out. It may just turn out to be cool to use a Russian SE.

[keyplyr]

All/most of the extensions via the Yandex extension catalog are made for Opera, so I'm assuming this browser is built on Opera framework. I tried to install several of these extensions, but was blocked from doing so... probably not until the browser is out of beta.

Yandex browser is so fast, it's scary! Probably only a matter of time before developers slow it down with update bloat, but until then this is fun.

The Tableau has replaced the traditional bookmarks drop-down for me, though I did import my Mozilla list.

[mcneely]

I've got a version of Yandex Browser from last year laying around here somewhere - I'll have to pull it out, blow the dust off of it - fire it up and see how it goes ..