Most privacy browsers ask you to trade a little convenience for a little protection. Mullvad Browser asks for much more. It is a desktop browser that drops your logins every time it closes and reports the wrong time zone on purpose, all so you look the same as everyone else running it. Built by Mullvad VPN together with the Tor Project, it covers Windows, macOS, and Linux. What you need to settle before you download Mullvad Browser is whether you can live by those rules or only visit them.
What Mullvad Browser inherits from Tor Browser, and what it leaves behind
The fingerprinting work arrives almost wholesale from Tor Browser: resist-fingerprinting mode is on, only a fixed set of fonts is exposed, hardware APIs are removed, sites cannot read back what WebGL draws, and letterboxing masks your real window size. What got left out is everything tied to onion routing, so there is no circuit isolation, no onion services, no built-in censorship circumvention. In return, pages load at the speed of your own connection instead of crawling through three relays, which is the entire reason this browser exists. The catch is in that inheritance. You get Tor Browser’s defenses and its restrictions, without the network-level anonymity the relays themselves provide.
Which protections are switched on before you change a setting?
Effectively everything. The design assumes you will change nothing, because most changes make you more identifiable, not less. uBlock Origin ships with the browser and cannot be removed, and neither can NoScript, since the security level control is built on it. Those levels run Standard, Safer, and Safest, each blocking more of what a page may execute. Safest restricts so much that some search pages refuse to load at all, so Standard is where most people stay.
Private browsing is not a mode here, it is the only mode. Cookies sit in per-domain jars through first-party isolation, so a tracker watching you on one site cannot join that to the next, and the set is wiped when you quit. A reset button gives you a clean session in one click. Telemetry is stripped out of the build, and Google’s deceptive content protection is switched off on the stated grounds that Google controls it. Recent releases track the shared Tor Browser base rather than piling on features.
The browser hides your fingerprint, not your IP address
By itself, Mullvad Browser does nothing about your address. Sites see the IP your connection hands them, exactly as they would in Chrome, and your provider still sees which domains you reach. Fingerprinting and IP exposure are separate problems, and only a VPN you trust behind the browser closes the second one. That pairing is what Mullvad built it for, though any provider works.
The Mullvad Browser Extension comes pre-installed and is the one piece tied to the paid service, since its proxy features need a Mullvad VPN account. Removing it changes nothing about your fingerprint.
Living with a browser that clears itself every time it closes
This is where the download decision gets made. Nothing stays signed in between sessions, and that is deliberate rather than an omission. The password manager is disabled, Firefox Sync is unsupported and will stay that way, and bookmarks plus settings are about all that survives a quit.
Three things get filed as bugs in the first session, and none of them is one. The clock reads wrong because the time zone is spoofed. The empty band around a page is letterboxing, which hands sites rounded window dimensions instead of your real ones. Downloaded files do not land in your system Downloads folder either, they go into the Mullvad Browser folder.
A short first run makes the rest easier:
Treat it as the second browser you open for the sessions that matter rather than the one you live in, and either put a VPN you trust behind it or accept that your address is still in the clear.
Mullvad Browser next to Tor Browser, LibreWolf, and Brave
All four answer the same worry and split over where the protection sits.
Tor Browser is the close relative and the stronger tool when the network itself is the threat, since it routes through three relays and reaches onion services. It pays in speed, and in sites that reject Tor exit addresses outright. Mullvad Browser keeps the fingerprint work and hands the network question to your VPN.
LibreWolf is the hardened Firefox for people who want to keep using Firefox. It removes telemetry at build time and ships uBlock Origin, but it does not chase the uniform-fingerprint goal, so tuning is expected of you.
Brave is the practical daily driver: Chromium based, blocking built in, with a mobile version and cross-device sync. It randomizes your fingerprint rather than standardizing it, which frustrates trackers by a different route while leaving you distinguishable from other Brave users.
Choose Mullvad Browser when fingerprinting is your main concern and a VPN already runs on your machine. Choose Tor Browser when the network is what you are hiding from, and Brave when one browser has to cover everything, phone included.
The job Mullvad Browser is worth downloading for
Download Mullvad Browser if fingerprinting is the part of tracking that bothers you most and a VPN already carries your traffic. Skip it if one browser has to cover everything, because the permanent sign-out and the missing sync will fight you daily, and Brave or a hardened Firefox will serve that job better. For making your browser look like every other copy of itself without slowing anything down, nothing in this category does it better, which is what makes it worth the download.
