Open source · MPL-2.0 · no accounts
Growser
A minimal fork of Brave-Browser that keeps its distance. No account, no advertising, no telemetry — taken out of the build, not switched off in a menu. Ads and trackers are blocked from the first run.
Download from the Microsoft Store
Download for Linux (.deb)
Android beta (.apk)
iPhone and iPad beta (TestFlight)
Android: a beta, before Google Play
The same browser for Android phones, signed with our key and handed out from this site while the Play listing is pending. It is a test build: tell us what breaks at [email protected].
- The browser warns that an APK might be harmful: choose Download anyway. Then open the file. Android asks once whether your browser may install apps - allow it for this one.
- When a newer beta is out, Growser shows Update Growser in its menu. Tap it, and install the new APK over the old one: your tabs, bookmarks and settings stay.
Android 10 or newer, 64-bit ARM. To be invited by e-mail instead, through Firebase App Distribution, write to the same address.
iPhone and iPad: a public beta in TestFlight
The same browser for iPhone and iPad, handed out through Apple's TestFlight while the App Store listing is pending. It is a test build: tell us what breaks at [email protected].
- Open the link on the iPhone or iPad. If TestFlight is not installed yet, the page leads to it in the App Store first.
- Accept the invitation and install Growser. TestFlight installs each newer beta for you, or offers it with an Update button.
A fork of Brave-Browser, with things taken out
Growser is a minimal fork of Brave-Browser, one of the most private browsers there is. The hard part — making Chromium private — is Brave's work: the shields, the blocker, the fingerprinting defences, the Tor windows. This fork starts from all of it and removes what a browser does not need: advertising and reward tokens, the wallet, the VPN being sold to you, the AI assistant, the telemetry, the daily ping.
Everything else of Brave's stays exactly as it is, because it needs no disabling. The method is not to rewrite a good browser but to subtract from it — and the subtraction continues: each release either takes something else out or writes down why it stays.
What is different from Chrome — and from the other Chromium browsers
Every line here is a decision in the build, and each one can be checked in the sources or in the binary. The detail lives in the privacy policy.
Nothing to sign in to
There is no Growser account, no sync server and no profile of you anywhere. History, bookmarks, passwords and cookies stay on your machine.
Telemetry is not in the binary
Usage statistics, the analytics subsystem and web discovery are
compiled out — ENABLE_P3A is 0 in the build we ship.
Nothing to switch off, and nothing that a later setting could switch
back on.
Nobody can manage it from outside
The tools an administrator, an MDM or a hijacker would use to control a browser — system policies, managed profiles, cloud management — are removed from the build. A registry key or a file planted on your machine changes nothing in Growser.
Google is answered, not told
Safe Browsing, site icons, component updates and form-structure
lookups still need Google's servers. They reach them through
backend.growser.org, so what arrives at Google is our
server's address, not yours.
Nothing is being sold to you
No advertising, no reward tokens, no crypto wallet, no VPN subscription, no AI assistant. Every one of them is compiled out rather than tucked away in a menu.
Crash reports are yours to give
The browser asks once, and says what a report contains. Answer no and nothing is ever sent; the answer can be changed later either way.
Internal pages have no network
Settings, the new tab page and the rest of the browser's own pages cannot reach the network at all. Where a remote answer is needed, the browser process fetches it and hands over data, never network reach. That rule is stricter than upstream Chromium's.
The blocker is the browser
Not an extension you remember to install, and not a setting somebody can talk you out of.
Ads and trackers are blocked from the first run, on every site, with the lists maintained by the people who maintain them — EasyList, EasyPrivacy and the rest, fetched from their own publishers. We do not run a list of our own, and there is no programme through which an advertiser can pay to be let through. Nobody can, because there is nobody to pay.
You can add your own rules in Adblock Plus syntax, turn the shields off for a single site when something breaks, or run the browser in blocking-only mode, where nothing but the blocker is active. What each control does is written out in what the settings do.
As fast as the browser you left
Privacy that costs you speed does not get used. Speedometer 3.1, one machine, a clean profile in each browser, the three runs back to back in a single session:
Measured on 31 August 2026 on one Windows machine, so read it as a tie rather than a ranking: under equal conditions the three sit within run-to-run noise of each other. Run it yourself at browserbench.org — that is the same test. We ship the release configuration Chromium itself ships with: official build, profile-guided optimisation, ThinLTO, and the debug assertions off. A fork that skips those is the one that feels slow.
Why this browser exists
I spent years building browsers for corporations and their purposes. I am building this one for people — not because I want to earn from it, but because I can, and because I want a browser that is genuinely private and genuinely safe to exist.
Your choice as a user is a simple one. Either you trust a corporation, or a group of people, who one way or another have to make money from what they give you — or you take a browser from one experienced browser engineer, with the source open for anyone to read.
And if you want to, and can, help me make it better.
— Dmitry Golubnichiy, the developer · read the sources · [email protected]
Take it for a week
Import your bookmarks and see whether you miss anything. If you do not, that is the whole argument.