Getting Started With SquareX
To use SquareX, visit the website and click the Personal button. (Yes, there’s also a button for the Enterprise edition, but that’s a different product, the one that actually makes money for SquareX). If your browser is supported, this will bring you to an install page for the browser extension. At present, the extension is available for Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi. I used the Chrome extension for testing.
Once the browser extension is installed, you click the toolbar button to continue. At this point, you create a free account with SquareX and verify your email address.
If you’re using an unsupported browser, you need to do a little digging for the SquareX web app. This app works in all major browsers including Firefox and Safari.
What Is a Disposable Browser?
When you go to launch a disposable browser, you choose one of nine locations: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, France, UK, Singapore, US East, or US West. My first guess on seeing these choices was that SquareX must function as a kind of VPN, or possibly a proxy server.
My SquareX contact explained that neither guess is correct. Your disposable browser is a Chrome instance “running on ephemeral containers on SquareX data centers” in a Linux environment. What you see on your local computer is just an image of that remote browser. Your mouse movements and keystrokes are transmitted securely to the remote browser, and any changes to the visible page are “projected to the end device in the form of a highly optimized stream of screenshots.”
A SquareX blog post points out that when you connect to a malicious website through a VPN, that connection is encrypted in transit, but the page arrives at your local computer with its malicious code still active. With SquareX, the worst a malicious page could accomplish is to damage the remote browser on the server. But the remote browser is ephemeral, vanishing when your session ends, so that damage is inconsequential.
Does SquareX Protect Your Privacy?
The main reason to use SquareX is to protect your browsing from any possible contact with malicious websites, programs, or code. However, a side benefit is that it seriously protects your privacy.
When you use a VPN or proxy server, the websites you visit see the IP address of the server. Your personal IP address is hidden, protecting your privacy. The same is true with SquareX. If you connect through the servers in England, for example, you appear to be in England.
You may notice a lack of ads in the disposable browser. That’s because it comes preloaded with the uBlock Origin ad blocker, a free, open-source tool. You can disable the blocker if it interferes with a particular page, but you can’t uninstall it. For security, you can’t install other extensions. Even if you could, your installation would disappear along with the disposable browser.
Since your entire session vanishes at the end of every disposable browser session, you don’t have to worry about cookie-based tracking. And any site that tries to track you using browser fingerprinting will wind up drawing its data from the browser on the SquareX server, not your personal browser. This is a different approach from browsers like Brave, which work by randomizing what your browser reports so as not to present a consistent fingerprint. Ghostery takes still another approach, blocking access by known fingerprinters and suppressing data requests from unknowns.
SquareX doesn’t offer a privacy-first search engine the way DuckDuckGo and Ghostery do. However, you’re free to connect with a private search engine from within SquareX.
Hands On With the Disposable Browser
When you launch a disposable browser, it’s best to pick the closest server location. As with a VPN, a more distant server can cause a slower connection. Just pick your server and click Start.
On launch, the...
