Web browsers telemetry – 2025

• April 20, 2025 at 06:53 IST
• web-browser
• privacy

Came across this detailed post at sizeof.cat talking about web browser telemetry in 2025. And I was surprised to see that how many connections from these popular browsers were phoning home. Let me shock you with the list:

• Zen Browser: 82
• Microsoft Edge: 48
• Floorp: 42
• Opera: 31
• Mozilla Firefox: 29
• Google Chrome: 25
• Yandex Browser: 24
• Librewolf: 24
• Waterfox: 21
• Brave: 17
• Arc Browser: 16
• Mullvad Browser: 15
• Vivaldi: 11
• Apple Safari: 6
• Ungoogled Chromium: 3
• Pale Moon: 0
• Kagi Orion: 0
• Tor Browser: 0

The author mentions that some of these connections were not telemetry, see the exact paragraph here:

Of course, not everything is telemetry per se, some of the connections are from the ‘New Tab’ pages that include Youtube videos, or adblocker updates, but I strongly believe that is the same thing: the software leaks information about you and/or your computer without you actually accepting the data exchange (because you don’t have a way to accept or deny the connection since it’s the first time you’re running the browser).

There are better ways to do adblock blocklist management and not load everything on the first run without user consent. Yeah, I know what pgl.yoyo.org does today, but what will it do tomorrow? Or the day after?

Also, remember that "best browser" cannot be decided just by this one factor and you'd need to consider a lot more.

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