Almost every browser is free. Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Safari, Opera – you download them and never pay a cent. That’s remarkable, because building a browser and maintaining it for years costs an enormous amount of money. Hundreds of developers, constant security updates, keeping up with a web that never stops changing.

When a product is free, usually the product itself isn’t the merchandise – it’s the delivery channel for something else. With browsers, then, the useful question isn’t “Which one is best?” but “How does this browser make its money?” The answer often tells you more about how your data is treated than any list of features ever could.

So let’s sort the field not by browser, but by business model.

The browser as gatekeeper to the search engine – this is where the big money is

When you open a new browser and type something into the address bar, your query goes to a preset search engine. That default setting is worth real money – so much that it can account for a browser’s entire value.

Google pays billions of dollars to be that default search engine. According to court documents, Google paid Apple roughly $20 billion for the year 2022 alone to be the default search in Safari on the iPhone and Mac. Similar payments go to Samsung and other device makers. And – to many people’s surprise – to Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox, as well.

Here’s the aha moment: of all browsers, Firefox – the one with the privacy reputation – is heavily dependent on Google financially. A very large share of its revenue comes from the deal that makes Google the default search in Firefox – according to a Mozilla executive’s court testimony, the overwhelming majority of it. Without that money, Firefox would be facing an existential threat. So the reason Firefox exists for free is, ironically, Google.

This dependency is currently the subject of a major legal battle in the United States: a court has ruled Google’s search monopoly illegal, yet Google is allowed to keep making those billion-dollar payments for default placement for now – while exclusive or long-term lock-in arrangements have been restricted. The case isn’t over. What matters most for you as a user is simply grasping how much money hangs on this seemingly trivial default setting.

This is also exactly where Safari fits. The stock browser on the Mac and iPhone has a double “business model”: Apple uses Safari to keep its users inside its own ecosystem – and simultaneously collects that billion-dollar payment from Google for the default search. That makes Apple one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Google deal, without running a search engine of its own.

The browser as its parent company’s advertising and lock-in machine

Chrome (Google) and Edge (Microsoft) don’t make money themselves – they are their respective companies’ money.

Chrome is the most-used browser in the world, and it gives Google a central position in how many people access the web – through search, login, sync, Google services and ad technology. Google’s actual business is advertising, and advertising gets more valuable the more precisely you know what someone is interested in. Chrome is an important building block of that business. The browser doesn’t need to make money on its own, because it feeds the advertising business that already does.

Edge serves a somewhat different but related goal for Microsoft: it funnels users as smoothly as possible into Microsoft’s own services – Bing search, Microsoft accounts, the various online offerings. Here too, the browser is the connective tissue to the larger ecosystem, not the product.

The browser with a revenue model of its own

Some browsers make their own money – sometimes in ways that aren’t immediately obvious to users.

Brave has its own advertising and rewards model: the browser blocks the usual ad trackers by default, but optionally offers its own ad system in which users can earn a small reward for viewing ads. Here the browser makes money itself, rather than just being a data doorway for a corporation.

Opera earns its money through advertising and financial services. Relevant for the privacy calculation: Opera was sold to a Chinese consortium in 2016; today the company is publicly traded, but it remains under strong Chinese ownership and control influence. That’s not an accusation, just a factual point worth knowing.

The more honest part of the field

There are browsers where you pay more with trust or with money than with data – and those deserve an explicitly positive mention.

Vivaldi was the quiet star of our browser comments: an unusually large number of devoted users spoke up. A small team, funded through partnerships – no data business running in the background. Frequently cited reasons to switch: the built-in email client with a calendar and, in one reader’s words, “no pushy AI nagging me.” These providers aren’t fools who forgot to make money – they made a deliberate choice against the data business.

The many small browsers – who’s behind them?

With the countless small browsers in particular, even informed users often don’t know what interest lies behind them. Most of them are built on the same foundation as Chrome and differ only in the trimmings – but behind the trimmings sit very different interests.

With the DuckDuckGo browser (now available for desktop and mobile), the whole thing is funded through more privacy-friendly, contextual search ads that key off your current search and don’t build personal user profiles.

The Mullvad Browser is a joint effort by the Tor Project and the VPN provider Mullvad – open source and free. Nobody makes money on the browser itself; the business model is indirect: Mullvad is a VPN provider and uses the privacy-friendly browser to lend its brand credibility, without forcing you to buy the VPN. A textbook case of “doesn’t make money on the browser, but uses it as a calling card for the actual product.”

Chromium, in turn, is Google’s open-source browser shell, from which many other browsers are built – Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera and Vivaldi all sit on top of it. Chromium itself has no business model of its own and no customer support. You can download prebuilt Chromium installers online, but there are no official, consumer-maintained downloads from Google and no automatic security updates from a single source – you’re dependent on third parties. For you as a user, that means Chromium is more the shell than a move-in-ready house – and if you download a “Chromium browser” from somewhere, you should know who assembled it.

Things look different with a group of browsers that come from antivirus and “tuning” companies – CCleaner Browser, Avast Secure Browser, or Avira Secure Browser, for example. Here the browser is often a channel to promote the company’s own security or paid products, or to collect data. With “security” browsers in particular, a healthy dose of skepticism is therefore warranted.

A revealing borderline case is SRWare Iron, a German Chromium offshoot that advertises “more privacy than Chrome.” That very claim, however, is disputed: the alleged extra privacy benefit is hard to verify independently from the outside. And with Chromium offshoots in particular, fast security updates matter – whether a small provider can keep pace over the long haul is hard for users to judge. In all honesty, the privacy advantage can’t be confirmed in any solid way. Iron is thus the prime example of an important distinction: privacy in the name or in the marketing pitch is not the same as demonstrated privacy.

The core message: the smaller and less familiar a browser is, the more worthwhile the question “Who’s behind this, and why?” – and for some, the answer is less harmless than the name (“Secure,” “Clean”) suggests.

Idealism without a business interest

At the very end of the spectrum sit projects with no commercial interest. LibreWolf is a community-maintained, privacy-tuned variant of Firefox. There’s no business model behind it, which is nice. The open question, though, is: who funds the long-term maintenance? Pure idealism projects live on the commitment of volunteers, and that’s a shakier foundation than a viable business model.

In a similar vein is Pale Moon, an old Firefox offshoot kept alive by a small community. Pale Moon maintains a classic browser line forked from Firefox with its own ecosystem of classic extensions – but ordinary, newer Firefox extensions don’t automatically run there. Here too there’s no commercial interest; the project sustains itself through donations and volunteers. That makes Pale Moon one of the honest cases – unlike the commercial Chromium offshoots, where a corporate or advertising interest sits in the background.

The mental tool you should take away

The revealing question about a free browser isn’t “Which one is best?” but “How does it make its money?” Ask that question, and you understand in one stroke why Firefox is free (Google), why Chrome and Edge don’t need to cost anything (they feed their parent companies’ advertising and services), and why Vivaldi works differently (small team, partnerships, no data business).

The best part: this mental tool works not just for browsers, but for any free digital service. The maps app, the social network, the photo storage, the weather app – ask yourself, for each of them, how it makes its money. The answer tells you more about how your data is treated than any glossy description in the app store.

Which browser do you use – and have you ever wondered why it’s free? Did it surprise you who actually funds Firefox? And how do you suppose the browser you just opened makes its money? Tell us in the comments – we’d love to hear it.