April 26, 2014

Epic Observations

I've been using  the Epic web broswer for 20 days and have gotten a feel for it. 

One of its features is a little pop up window that tells what trackers it is blocking. 

To the right is the NY Daily News. Interestingly 4-chan of all places had only one, and that’s only on certain boards. I probably need to stay away from those boards anyway...I already wear glasses.

Of course the browser’s extreme focus on privacy comes with a few quirks, with a lack of spewlchek being the most keenly felt. Since it carries no cache data it is a bit slower to load. Occasionally one finds a site that reacts badly to anything that doesn't let it track its viewers and demands that you its their cookies like some rabid girl scout. I haven’t been blocked from any site however.

Aside from the slightly slower loading, the only functionality quirks I’ve found so far are as follows. Occasionally embedded videos on some Wordpress blogs do not show up. There are a few quirks with the Dashboard in Minx (The Mee’n You blog engine) but said quirks are present in Safari and Opera as well. 

On the plus side, it seems to have the amazing ability to disable only the bad pop-up windows.

Let me explain.

ODU’s website opens certain features in pop-up windows and pop up blockers (like the ones ion the ODU learning commons computers…) generally disable that functionality. However, they work fine in Epic. On the other hand, I have not seen a pop-up AD since I started using the browser. I have had no issues with Paypal, which surprised me. I understand that Epic allows people to view HULU from outside the US and while I cannot confirm that, I can say that I was able to access one Japanese site that normally blocks US  access…and I was thoroughly scarred by the experience.

One's mileage may vary, but I think the slightly slow loading is a small price to pay for the added privacy.

This of course is assuming that the whole thing isn’t an NSA honey pot to snare us paranoids .



Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 02:19 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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1 I poked around with Epic, but the lack of any extension support makes me wary.  Specifically, you can't run ScriptSafe (the Chrome equivalent to NoScript).  Now yes, you can manually white/blacklist sites for javascript natively, but it's kind of a hassle and the lack of temporary whitelists is somewhat annoying.  That pushed me to Pale Moon, but I'm also running Epic on the side to see if I can get used to it.  Oh, and there's no mouse gestures or tab mix plus in chrome, but that's more icing than anything else.

Posted by: ReallyBored at Sat Apr 26 13:17:23 2014 (n3V1X)

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