Norton Secure Browser: Guess what? Its not.

3 min readDec 25, 2023

I recently found out about Norton’s new browser when I was hanging out with my grandparents and decided to look into it. Here are my findings, maybe stay away from Norton.

This article is available in note form at https://pastebin.com/yyN27Fr9

Google is hiding inside.

Norton Secure Browser is based on non de-googled chromium. Which isn’t very weird, Edge, Opera and Chrome do the same thing, but its also not very private, because it has a Google backdoor.

Its stolen from Avast.

Norton Secure Browser is an almost identical rip-off of Avast’s (another anti-virus company) browser, just with Norton extensions instead of avast ones. In even runs the same hosting servers for the ads (below).

This is the image source code for an ad on the home page, its pulling the image file from avastbrowser.com, the browser knocked off.

Virus check.

I uploaded the browser to VirusTotal, a site which checks a file sample against 71 different anti viruses, 4/71 anti virus programs flagged as potentially malicious, One of the Anti-Virus vendors, Bkav, even flagged the fact that it was a clone.

Bkav Antivirus Pro flagged it as a variant of Avast Secure Browser.

Search Engine

As far as searching, the default search engine is a logo-swapped version of Ask.com. As for the “security” of Ask.com, regular Ask.com runs trackers for Google, Amazon, and Magnite, and 4 third parties.

Third party trackers Ask.com attempted to load.

Norton’s version seems a bit safer, only running trackers from Google (but a lot of them), and 4 third parties.

Third party trackers Norton attempted to load.

Fingerprint Test.

I decided to see how much information tracking companies could collect from Norton’s browser with Norton’s preinstalled extensions vs. my Firefox browser with the DuckDuckGo extension, and uBlock Origin ad/popup/malicious content blocker.
How? I used the EFF’s Cover Your Tracks fingerprinting test (https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/)

Here’s the results:

Norton:
[EFF] tests indicate that you are not protected against tracking on the Web.
Blocking tracking ads? No.
Blocking invisible trackers? No.
Protecting you from fingerprinting? [Norton Secure Browser] has a unique fingerprint.

Firefox (with extensions):
[EFF] tests indicate that you have strong protection against Web tracking.
Blocking tracking ads? Yes.
Blocking invisible trackers? Yes.
Protecting you from fingerprinting? [My Version of Firefox] has a unique fingerprint.

That’s pretty sad for a “secure” browser.

So what does it actually do?
Well, it comes with several built in tools that are kinda nice, like a coupons searching tool like Honey or Capital One Shopping. It seems to have an ad blocker, although it might be biased and not block ads on all sites, knowing Norton. Now, it has a password manager, but its cloud based and that tends not to be the best idea (https://www.wired.com/story/lastpass-engineer-breach-security-roundup/).

At the end of the day, if your goal is being secure and private online, you probably shouldn’t trust a big tech company like Norton. If you insist or know someone who insists on using this browser, adding the extensions I have on Firefox (uBlock, DuckDuckGo)are great for beginners and mainly run in the background (both are open source so you can verify nothing sketchy is happening) and switching the search engine to DuckDuckGo or Brave. People might tell you to throw in a VPN but most VPN selling points are false.
If you do those things, your browser will be way better, but its still a chromium browser so google trackers are literally built in.

Anyways,

Stay safe.