Epic Privacy Browser Forums

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Thanks and Feedback...

I've been using Epic Browser for a while now and it's become my favorite (and default) browser so I thought I'd post here to say thanks and also to mention some things I think it could do with. Hopefully these comments will be useful or food for thought...?

1. Download Manager. Others have mentioned this. My vote is for emulating Down Them All (available for Firefox) but rather than having it as an extension build it into the browser. It's beyond my understanding why all browsers don't just build in proper multi-threaded downloading in this day and age. To max out modern connections you need multi-threaded downloads. To prevent any problems for non-advanced users make the default a single thread download - but in advanced settings allow users to tweek how many threads and how many concurrent downloads are allowed. You could even miss out the management bits - as long as you enable multi-threading and concurrent downloads (which would be a fairly simple task by itself but so crucial to get away from slow downloads - currently I cut/paste links to anything large into Down Them All but this means I need to run Firefox when I want to download anything - I'd rather just stay in Epic).

2. Please Make the Update Method Public and Optionally Manual. My firewall was complaining like mad when I first installed Epic due to the way it auto updates on Windows. Suddenly there were all these mysterious setup.exe files trying to run. I investigated and identified what they were and was ok with it once I figured it out (except on one of my machines it kept complaining all the time even when I ok'd it so I just disabled auto-update manually by killing off the service) but general consumers won't know this. They will think that installing Epic has installed trojans on their system (which is what my Firewall was saying). In a browser that sells privacy as a feature this is a fairly big PR flaw.

3. Disable Proxy - When the proxy is ON the widget in the URL bar should allow you to turn the proxy off when searching at Google. I know this will probably reveal who you are to Google due to cookies. However, I want to be able to make this decision myself in case it's necessary rather than having to go back into settings and disable proxy again. Ideally when you turned it off at Google it would come up with an alert warning you that you are about to reveal who you are to Google. Going via settings to enable/disable the proxy is long winded and as a result I tend to run Epic with it disabled. If I could make the choice whether it's on or off everywhere including Google from the URL bar then I would leave it enabled all the time and be a lot happier. Even better if I could define WHICH proxy to use in case I want to use my own better one...

4. HTTP Referrer On/Off - would be nice to have a toggle for this right on the interface. It's very privacy related too so a natural feature for Epic.

5. Built in Disposable Email Generator - Another natural privacy feature - how about a button which creates a disposable email for you - disposable email provided by Epic or a third party partner? This would eliminate the need to use other third party email providers. Ideally the disposable email would be "optionally" disposable - so you could manage it - but just a short life 15 minute disposable would be simple and good enough for dealing with annoying registration forms and spam control. These sorts of emails just forward to another email address for 15 mins or however long they are enabled for (if you are not aware).  Look at mailinator.com as an example.

7. Linux/FreeBSD/NetBSD/UNIX Versions Needed ...

8. Not Having to Close Epic Regularly for Better Performance would be good. This seems to be due to memory issues... I've had it running all day and looking in my task manager it's currently using 1GB of memory - looks like memory is not being released somewhere. Perhaps work in progress?

BUGS:

1. If I delete a adblock list that I don't want to use it seems to come back next session. Would be nice if that could be sticky.

2. Trying to pin it down - but some pages with lots of graphics crawl in Epic - like it takes 30 seconds to scroll a line - this doesn't happen in Chrome so I suspect it's an Epic related issue. If I figure out what combination of images/plug ins causes this I will report if there is any interest.

OTHER THAN ALL THAT:

Thanks for creating my favourite browser of the moment... keep working at making it better While it may not be perfect regarding privacy as some others have pointed out at least you are trying - which nobody else is. Privacy ought to be a fundamental goal IMO.