Krypton Anonymous Browser Review - What Happened?

What was the Krypton Anonymous Browser?

The Krypton Anonymous Browser was developed in 2014, and versions of it appear to have circulated on the Play store as recently as 2018. However, at the time of this review, the app has been removed from the Play store, and all former links to the developer's website now lead to unused domains.

Judging from user reviews dating back to its availability, Krypton boasted some useful features for the privacy-conscious user, such as built-in one-touch toggleable TOR support. The developer cited a Chromium basis for the project, aiming to supply a lightweight, minimalistic browser with full user anonymity. But there were issues as well, which we'll discuss later.

What are the Benefits of the Krypton Anonymous Browser?

While the Krypton Anonymous browser might not be available, we can still examine its benefits (should it return) or at least compare it to other products.

TOR (The Onion Router) is a free, open-source tool that disguises the end-user's location by bouncing it through a network of relays. It also blocks trackers, auto-clears cookies and browser history, and disguises your browser fingerprint so as not to disclose your identity in any fashion. As far as on-board features we'd love to see in any browser, TOR seems like an ideal choice to protect user privacy. Reviews cited its inclusion as the main highlight of the Krypton browser. TOR offers its own browser now, available for PC, Mac, Linux, and Android.

As a free product, Krypton Anonymous didn't come with many features and focused primarily on maintaining user privacy. Krypton also offered a low-cost upgrade to remove ads (a common annoyance of free alternative browsers, and perhaps a small price to pay for not having your data stolen and sold), along with saving favorites and history, full-screen video, and find-in-page. These may seem like standard features, but given their freeware approach, it's perhaps forgivable that the developer chose to place these behind a small paywall.

In addition to the above, Krypton further sought to protect user data by auto-clearing cookies, history, and any other cached data. This might prove an inconvenience for frequented sites or casual browsing, but keeping such data off of your browser and device storage greatly increases device and data security. Similarly, with TOR enabled, browsing via Krypton would apparently trigger most sites' bot-checks, requiring the user to constantly verify their humanity. As with many such considerations over personal data, it's an argument of convenience vs. privacy and security.

What was Wrong with Krypton?

In general, most reviews of Krypton seemed positive, though as an app still in the early stages of development from a small developer, it had a few issues. One complaint was the toggleable nature of TOR, as this was Krypton's primary means of maintaining anonymity, and it wasn't on by default, nor did it warn users that their browsing session wasn't anonymized without TOR turned on. Some users reported difficulties installing or downloading Krypton, which may have simply been an incompatibility issue with various devices, but not enough test data remains available to say for certain.

Notably, the developer never provided answers to forum questions regarding potential vulnerabilities in the browser, such as if it passed the FREAK attack test. FREAK is an SSL/TLS vulnerability discovered in 2015 (not long after the release of Krypton) which could allow hackers to hijack a browsing session and steal data. Most major modern browsers are now secure against this exploit, but smaller projects such as Krypton would have needed adjustments to protect against the newly discovered (at the time) vulnerability. Other users reported failures of the AdBlock feature in the paid version of the browser.

It's unclear if these issues were ever addressed. The developer stopped responding to forum questions at some point in 2015.

Where is Krypton Anonymous Now?

As best as we can determine, Krypton disappeared sometime in 2018 or 2019. There is no indication if the project changed names, if the developer ceased its support entirely, or if the developer disappeared for other reasons. Its removal from the Play store could be due to any number of causes, and there's no way to tell if it was removed by the developer or Google itself. Eventually, unmaintained projects and unreachable devs are reason enough to prune software from the Play store. So at some point in late 2016, Krypton's home page turned into a Japanese advice blog for hair loss. Now, the domain is simply up for sale.

It may be possible to find an APK of the Krypton browser, but we wouldn't recommend downloading files from unknown sources, and there's no guarantee an outdated version of the app would continue to function. The last known official version of it can be located via the wayback machine here.

Hopefully, the developer of Krypton will return with an updated version of the app. In the meantime, other options such as the TOR browser, Brave, Aloha, Firefox, Dolphin, etc. may fit your privacy needs. While you're here, you might want to check out our Aloha browser review.