However, extensions that will change this browser’s interface are out of the picture, which means that no themes are allowed.
It does come with a built-in extension block, but Avast Secure Browser always gives you decision power and will let you install any extension whose source you confirm to be trustworthy. Since Avast Secure Browser is a Chromium browser, it’s compatible with most Chrome extensions.
For now, it's only fully available for Windows 8 and onwards, but there is already an early access version for macOS users.
However, that also means extensions are limited, and therefore no themes are available, which is a fair trade-off when compared to full protection online.
To do so, Avast Secure Browser comes with plenty of neat, built-in features that will make sure you can fearlessly surf the internet.
Avast SafeZone’s successor, which was removed not long before this launch, comes with three main objectives: fast browsing, protecting personal info from malware, phishing, and other threats, and protecting your privacy.
Want to learn more about how Avast can keep you safe? Take a look at our Avast Antivirus solutions review.Avast has one of the most popular free antiviruses in the world, and in 2018, launched a free Chromium-based web browser: Avast Secure Browser. It’s also nice to have a browser that syncs across devices, as many users will be hopping between their desktop and mobile throughout the day or week. And with its own Addons store and access to the Chrome extensions store, you can add any functionality you’re missing out of the box. While Avast’s features are limited, they do make sense – changing your theme for better visibility and grouping tabs are both valuable options. If you’re visiting a lot of sites per day, this makes a big difference in time, and it strains your brain less because there’s not as much to pay attention to or work around. Pages load fast, and you don’t have to wait mid-read for an ad to pop up. Final verdictįor the daily internet user who may head online to shop or work, the most powerful and noticeable feature is the ad-blocker. The Anti-Fingerprint and Anti-Phishing features we talked about above are good examples of this. In terms of its privacy settings, Avast has a lot covered that other browsers don’t. However, tweaking settings for the browsers may show different results, and the score gap wasn’t vast to begin with, so you could argue that they’re all roughly the same speed-wise. The competitionĪvast feels faster than other browsers when ad-blocking is enabled, and in our testing using Speed Battle, it did perform a bit faster than Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. On mobile, you can turn on the ad and tracker blocking feature, and there are a number of mobile-specific security features you can turn on or off. And if there’s some reason why you don’t want your info synced, you don’t have to enable it, and you can use Avast on your devices independently. The Avast browser is available for Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows.īrowser data can be synced across all of your devices so that you can move between them freely without missing out on things like bookmarks and history. It also made for a cleaner appearance, closer to reading mode than a regular ad-filled page. When set to Strict, web pages loaded super-fast on Avast, and scrolling to read an article was more enjoyable, too, because there weren’t ads auto-populating along the way. The ad-blocker worked really well for us. Clicking the grayed-out Shield icon on the top-right of the browser lets you pause and unpause ad-blocking via a pop-up.
If you have 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 on the grey shield in the top right of a browser window lets you pause or unpause Avast's ad blocker (Image credit: Avast)