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Beware of Browzar. It might sound just the biz...

With Browzar you can search and surf the web without leaving any visible trace on the computer you are using.

Browzar is based on the Internet Explorer browser engine. Its free and only takes seconds to download and you don’t even need to install it, so you can download Browzar time and time again, whenever and wherever you need it to protect your privacy.

...but it's not quite all it's cracked up to be.

Browzar's attraction is that it magically makes your web work more secure. It's promoted as an easy way to surf the internet without leaving sensitive information lying about. It'll automatically delete internet caches, histories, and cookies, and it doesn't use auto-complete - which anticipates the terms a user might enter.

It's what's known as a "custom wrapper" for Internet Explorer - and that alone should sound alarm bells. Tidying up the interface and adding a few extra features doesn't make the underlying engine any more secure. In fact in Browzar's case they've made it worse.

That secure-browsing feeling is just a mirage. Though Browzar deletes what it says it does, it doesn't wipe the files - meaning that anyone can come along later and use an undelete utility to recover them. On top of that it uses ActiveX - a known security weakness in itself - that retains a list of websites visited in the index.dat file. You can't change Browzar's homepage - you always have to visit their home site - and worst of all it skews search results in favour of paid advertisements. Security guru Bruce Schneier sums it up; "This browser seems to be both fake and full of adware."

My advice: Avoid, with a capital "A".

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