New kid on the block

[ByTeWrangler]

Greeting's

Yup, there is a new kid on the block which in its own words promises "private Surfing on the Net". Well don't get too excited, the privacy its talking about is not the one from "BIG BROTHER" but its simple kind of privacy like no cookies or searched URL's being left on the system.

Well its not something new or hi-tech, the browser just deletes the cookies after every session on its own. It doesn't store any URL at all. Something which IE and Firefox let you do manually.

What surprises me is the website, while its mostly of just one page (besides the usual contact us, download etc) gives minimal information about the browser and its functionality (personally SOMETHING I DON'T LIKE)


Here is the link to its homepage : http://www.browzar.com/

[Lv4]

here is some stuff from the FD mailing list about this browser:

Read over on Slashdot about the "no footprints" browser Browzar.
As with every potential new browser in the market I quickly booted
into a virtual machine to check compatibility with my major applications.

A 264KB download sounded way to little for a full browser application.
Not surprisingly Browzar is just a wrapper around the IE rendering engine.

Let's have a look

Download Browzar
Fire up Filemon
Set a filter for "Browzar"
Start Browzar and open "http://www.mikx.de"

As the expected files like ieframe.dll fly by a certain file hits my eyes:

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Temporary Internet
Files\Content.IE5\index.dat

Could it be so easy?

Copy the location string
Open the file on Notepad
Search for "mikx.de" and *whups* there it is

Maybe Browzar cleans after itself? So closing Browzar,
opening the index.dat again. Still there.

Wow, that's privacy you can trust.

browzar.com is currently down, so no proper vendor notification so far.

mikx

Browzar apparently wraps IE - so the User Agent will be the same as
your IE installation.

Anyone else think this is less about privacy and more about the
default sponsored search/home page coded into the browser (which
apparently can't be changed?

[Lv4]

and lastly, since AO doesn't seem to let you have more than four tags in a posting, or it could be because of all the smilies in this quote but I'm not real sure.

It does use the ms browser (same as IE) with CLSID
8856F961-340A-11D0-A96B-00C04FD705A2 implemented as CWebBrowser2 and
shows the usual "Internet Explorer_Server". bummer.

Right-click is disabled, but if you press the Windows keyboard
'righ-click' button then the usual IE context menu shows up

Also if you put in the address bar: res://shdoclc.dll/pagerror.gif
you'll see that IE windows display the resource

All urls are hardcoded into the exe:

http://www.browzar.com/search?q=
http://www.browzar.com/start
http://www.browzar.com/faq?v=
http://www.browzar.com/update?v=
http://www.browzar.com/problem?v=
http://www.browzar.com/help?v=
http://www.browzar.com/search?SPID=2&q=
http://www.browzar.com/tryagain?u=

Changing them it's pretty easy

They should at least implement a skin engine, which dynamically changes
the skin, and you don't have to download a black or silver version

I didn't find anything special about this app.