A Chromium-based browser with handy security features

ByLindsay Pietroluongopublished 27 September 21

Avast is at its best when ad-blocking & other security features are enabled, making it a swift, sleek, & safe competitor in the browser market.

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ForColor-coded and labeled tab groupingLarge extensions store, plus Chrome extensionsAdvanced privacy & security settingsFast speeds compared to leading browsers
AgainstLimited productivity toolsFew personalization optionsPayment required for some security features

Avast is at its best when ad-blocking và other security features are enabled, making it a swift, sleek, and safe competitor in the browser market.

Pros+ Color-coded & labeled tab grouping+ Large extensions store, plus Chrome extensions + Advanced privacy và security settings+ Fast speeds compared lớn leading browsers
Cons- Limited productivity tools- Few personalization options- Payment required for some security features

Avast Secure Browser isn’t a browser with many bells and whistles, especially outside of the privacy và security realm. That may be just fine with you, though. If you want a browser that’s a cinch to install và use, và you care much more about privacy than customization, you’ll barely notice that Avast is limited when it comes khổng lồ features.

Avast works pretty well without you making any significant changes lớn its settings. It looks và functions similar to lớn Chrome, and the default tìm kiếm engine is Google, so you can get started in a familiar environment right away. With a few tweaks to the comprehensive sầu security settings page, you’ll be done personalizing your browser altogether (unless you want to change its aesthetics).

Features

If you have sầu a bunch of tabs open & want to group them for easier at-a-glance visibility, you can right-click the tab và choose "Add lớn Tab Group", then create a new group or add the tab to lớn an existing one. Name the group whatever you like, và choose a color. In the screenshot above, you can see that a few tab groups have been created.

The Avast Addons store has extensions in various categories to lớn extend the functionality of your browser.

Otherwise, Avast’s features are what you’d expect. You can change the theme và color scheme a bit, decide what happens when you open a new window, phối Avast as your mặc định browser, & play around with other basic settings.

Privacy

When you spover time online with Avast, your data remains safe from hackers, and tracking from third parties is also blocked. Malicious downloads & websites are blocked too (Anti-Phishing), along with dangerous extensions (Extension Guard), và Avast forces sites khổng lồ use encryption so your info is even more protected.

Avast Secure Browser"s Haông xã Check feature allows you to lớn see if your gmail address was exposed in a data breach or leak (Image credit: Avast)

Avast also masks your online identity with Anti-Fingerprinting so sites can’t identify you or keep trachồng of your online profile. And as with many browsers, there’s login data control via the Haông chồng Chechồng feature, so you can run your email address to see if your passwords were included in a leak.

Avast Secure Browser comes packed with security và privacy features though you will have lớn pay if you want access to all of them (Image credit: Avast)

All of the browser’s security & privacy settings can be accessed in the Security & Privacy Center. Some options have sầu khổng lồ be paid for & may come with a free download or trial, like Avast Security.

This is the user interface of Avast Secure Browser (Image credit: Avast)

User experience

Avast looks very much like Google Chrome, which makes sense because the browser is built on the same Chromium platform. The mặc định search engine is Google, but you can switch to Bing, DuckDuckGo, or Yahoo if you’d lượt thích. That’s all khổng lồ say that you’re probably familiar with how the browser and search engine look and feel, making the learning curve practically non-existent.

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You can choose which ads are blocked when browsing the web (Image credit: Avast)

Avast auto-blocks ads, which makes page-load time faster. You can opt to hide all ads or only the most aggressive ones.

Clicking on the grey shield in the top right of a browser window lets you pause or unpause Avast"s ad blocker (Image credit: Avast)

If you have sầu ad-block enabled on Avast, you can temporarily turn it off when you’re on a site where you may want to see ads. Clicking the grayed-out Shield icon on the top-right of the browser lets you pause & unpause ad-blocking via a pop-up.

The ad-blocker worked really well for us. When mix to lớn Strict, web pages loaded super-fast on Avast, and scrolling to lớn read an article was more enjoyable, too, because there weren’t ads auto-populating along the way. It also made for a cleaner appearance, closer khổng lồ reading mode than a regular ad-filled page.

Platforms

The Avast browser is available for Android, iOS, Mac, và Windows.

Browser data can be synced across all of your devices so that you can move between them freely without missing out on things lượt thích bookmarks and history. And if there’s some reason why you don’t want your info synced, you don’t have to enable it, & you can use Avast on your devices independently.

On sản phẩm điện thoại, you can turn on the ad & tracker blocking feature, and there are a number of mobile-specific security features you can turn on or off.

The competition

Avast feels faster than other browsers when ad-blocking is enabled, & in our testing using Speed Battle, it did perform a bit faster than Chrome, Firefox, và Safari. However, tweaking settings for the browsers may show different results, and the score gap wasn’t vast to lớn begin with, so you could argue that they’re all roughly the same speed-wise.

In terms of its privacy settings, Avast has a lot covered that other browsers don’t. The Anti-Fingerprint and Anti-Phishing features we talked about above sầu are good examples of this.

Final verdict

For the daily mạng internet user who may head online khổng lồ cửa hàng or work, the most powerful và noticeable feature is the ad-blocker. Pages load fast, and you don’t have to wait mid-read for an ad to lớn pop up. If you’re visiting a lot of sites per day, this makes a big difference in time, & it strains your brain less because there’s not as much to lớn pay attention lớn or work around.

While Avast’s features are limited, they vì chưng make sense ­– changing your theme for better visibility & grouping tabs are both valuable options. And with its own Addons store và access to the Chrome extensions store, you can add any functionality you’re missing out of the box. It’s also nice khổng lồ have sầu a browser that syncs across devices, as many users will be hopping between their desktop and mobile throughout the day or week.

Want khổng lồ learn more about how Avast can keep you safe? Take a look at our Avast Antivirus solutions Đánh Giá.