Questions

It is free and MIT licensed, and there is no paid tier.

The honest answer to "what's the catch" is that Privoo is an independent project rather than a company. There is no support contract, no guaranteed release schedule and no security team on call. In exchange, there is nobody who needs your data to make the numbers work.

Brave and Firefox are both good and both far better resourced. If you want a browser with a security team behind it, use one of them.

Privoo's difference is that it has no business model at all. No account, no sync service, no advertising product, no rewards token, no partnerships in the address bar. Everything is on your disk because there is nowhere else for it to be.

Partly. Privoo can load unpacked extensions and .crx files from the Extensions page, and a compatibility layer covers a good share of the Chrome extension APIs, but not all of them, and complex extensions may not work correctly.

The things most people install an extension for are already built in: ad blocking, a password manager, a downloader and notes.

Two requests you did not directly ask for: an update check on launch, and a periodic refresh of the ad-blocking filter lists. Both can be turned off, and neither carries anything about you.

There is no analytics, no crash reporting and no sync. See the privacy page for the full account.

Yes. Privoo offers to import from Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Brave on first run, and you can do it later from Settings → Import. It reads the other browser's profile folder on your own disk; nothing is uploaded.

Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini and DeepSeek on an API key of your own, or any model you have installed locally through Ollama.

Requests go straight from your machine to the provider you picked. Privoo is not a relay and never sees the conversation; your key is encrypted on disk. With Ollama, nothing leaves your machine at all.

A way to publish a folder from your own computer as a website reachable over Tor, with no server, no domain and no port forwarding. The browser is the host.

Your machine has to be awake and online for it to answer, and visitors need Tor to reach the address. It is for sharing something directly, not for running a site.

Because the link has one of a small number of shapes used to make an address read as one site while pointing at another: a name hidden before an @, characters that only look like letters, or a well-known brand on somebody else's domain.

The check is deliberately narrow so that it almost never fires on an ordinary link. You can go ahead anyway, or turn it off in Settings → Privacy.

Filter lists are compiled at launch, so restart Privoo first. A list that refreshed mid-session is not active until then.

Then check that Privacy Shield is enabled at privoo://extensions/. If one site in particular is leaking, it is worth reporting so a rule can be added.

Almost always a GPU issue. Privoo works around the common cold-start case automatically; if it persists, turn off hardware acceleration in Settings → Performance and restart.

Check the download folder set in Settings, and that Privoo has permission to write to it. privoo://downloads/ shows the live state of every download including failed ones, which usually says what happened.

Most likely the blocker or the fingerprint protection. Open the shield in the toolbar and turn protection off for that site. It is remembered per site, so the rest of your browsing is unaffected.

If it works with protection off, that is worth reporting . It usually means a filter rule is too broad.

Settings → About → Reset restores the defaults without touching your bookmarks or passwords. To start completely fresh, close Privoo and delete the profile folder listed on the privacy page.