Epic Privacy Browser Forums

First of all I'd like to say thanks to all the Epic staff and creators for their efforts, may you be blessed, it seems your "free" product has been immensely helpful to all for many years, let us hope the future looks bright as well.

The reason I am posting here is that it seems my Epic browser has been disabled so that it no longer blocks anything any more and I can't seem to find how to re-instate Epic so that it does one of the most important things it is supposed to do: block tracking. So here are the full technicolor atrocities in full 19th century gory detail and the accompanying questions I have which I will repeat in succinct form at the end: 

Dear reader please allow me the rare 21st century indulgence of actually explaining something: It all started when I noticed that my tracking blocker notification window, or whatever it is called, hopefully I have dubbed it aptly enough that you know what I am referring to, but what I mean is the thingy muh bopper that is supposed to notify you of who is trying to track you in the lower right hand corner of the browser, yes, that thing, that thing stopped appearing. I'm not sure when this started exactly, though I recall a few months back   it occurred to me I was no longer seeing the notifications and I also recall that I shrugged it off  thinking that probably just the notification had been shut off somehow and out of my perhaps not inconsiderable magnanimity I assumed that the tracker blocker was  in fact still doing its job. I may have caused the "problem" myself as  I vaguely recall being unable to read something on a website a few months back because the tracker blocking window was blocking me from being able to see the text, and I got a bit rash (no, not a skin rash silly, rash in this sense means I got impatient) and hit an off switch that appears in very dim grey text on the notification window itself, as I recall, and which in any case has always been ambiguous to me, I can't figure out if it is for turning off the tracking itself or just for switching on and off the notification. I'm not sure why anyone would want to turn off the tracking, but you never know, there may be good reasons for that in some cases that I am unaware of,  so it doesn't seem to go without saying that hitting “off” on the tracker blocker window simply means turning the notifications off.

So one fine day, despite the ambiguity in my own mind of the purpose and/or meaning of tracking off button,  I just sort of went ahead as you might do and jumped into the abyss and hit the button so that I could read something I absolutely had to read, but it seems that unfortunately now that impatient action of mine may have thrown the whole main functionality of Epic into now what seems like permanent unrestorable oblivion. I cannot find anything in the settings or any mention anywhere in the forums for how to get Epic to start blocking trackers or to provide notification and perhaps even block ads again.

Today I saw what i think is additional confirmation that the tracker blocker has gone walkabout and the tracker counter confirmed just what I feared: it read, "00 Trackers Blocked." Just to check, I kept visiting sites and doing various internet stuff and returned to see that after all of that nothing had been blocked: it remained unchanged and read “00.” By tracker counter I mean the thing  that appears at the bottom of the page when you open a brand new tab in Epic. It has the resemblance to an old car odometer  or manual clicker counter device for those who like to keep track of the count of anything in the real world. I apologize if you are too young to have any  idea of what either of those things could possibly be, counters or odometers, but in any case one might say that perhaps there is a mechanical numeric readout, oldtime look to the numbers of this counter at the bottom of the new tab page on Epic.

Also, when I click on the umbrella  in the upper right zone of the browser, I notice that now there is a much reduced list of options compared to what a help page on this site shows, that's unfortunate, but still there is something that says “Adblock (if installed) No/Yes.”

Pardon me if speak a bit too directly and to the point here and seem to be unwiling to play along to get along, but  what is that about? If installed? It would now seem that actually, contrary to what I was thinking, that Epic automatically blocks ads and the accompanying tracking and snitching operations, but rather to the  contrary, if I haven’t misunderstood something, that in actuality  it only does so if you have installed an Ad blocker. If that is true, then what is the point of using Epic in the first place? OK, maybe that is a rhetorical question, I am sure Epic has other great features but I am 90% interested in keeping these tracking nick nacks out of my hair and my life. It is positively revolting and disgusting to me that the whole basis of many businesses is to on the sly follow you around and report your internet activities. I don;t care that everyone needs ad revenue, find another way and until then I will just block the ads too as well as the human rights violations of tracking and reporting on people.

And if I want to use Epic’s tracking and blocking features how then do I install the adblockers, which incidentally I read that Epic warns against as Adblockers just simply replace one group of spies and snitches with another and the adblocking company takes over the data collection and just hands hands it right back over the people you are trying to block. Is there a better option than installing an adblocker as the button under the umbrella tab now seems to suggest? Or in the worst case are there any supposedly trustworthy ad blockers and/or good articles ou and discussions out there to help me suss this out? Or am I mistaken and does Epic still, as a sort of base, always on function, block trackers and ads?

To be honest all of this, if it is what I think it is, is pretty major and worthy of an article in the blog here and not easy to miss notifications that Epic has had a major overhaul and no longer blocks tracking and ads. As of now this seems to be something only I am going through for God knows what reason.

And so, as promised earlier in this book I have written here,  to put my questions in a nutcase shell, they are:

1. Does Epic still block ads and tracking?

2. If Epic does block trackers still, how do I switch the blocking function on or how do I best do that with other solutions if Epic has dropped blocking trackers?

3. If Epic does block trackers and you reckon it still is doing so for me, how do I switch on the notification option so that I can see what it is blocking?

3. Why, when I click on the umbrella icon, does it indicate “Yes” for “Adblock” when it doesn’t seem to block any ads. I can’t remember the last time I saw the wonderful unhappy Mac face where normally an ad would be and now once I see all manner of things such as perhaps exclusive and bracingly minty fresh vegan spearmint THC and CBD free mouthwash for Grammarly users.